Challenging Authorities: Ethnographies of Legitimacy and Power in Eastern and Southern Africa 3030769232, 9783030769239

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction: Investigating Authority and Its Legitimization in Contemporary Africa
1 Authority, Power, and Legitimacy in a Post-Factual World
2 Conceptual Clarifications
3 Authorities in Context
4 Diverse Authorities in African Settings
5 On This Volume
5.1 Power and the (Post)Colonial State
5.2 Contested Authorities and State Power
5.3 Power and Authority over Space
5.4 Conflict, (In)Justice, and Plural Legitimacies
6 Alternative Authorities?
References
Part I: Power and the (Post)Colonial State
Whose State? Whose Nation? Representations of the History of the Arab Slave Trade and Nation-Building in Tanzania
1 Introduction: History and Nation-Building in Postcolonial States
2 The Research: Questions, Methods, Scope, and Significance
3 Arabs and Their Involvement in the Slave Trade in East Africa: A Brief Overview
4 Field Evidence About the Attitudes of African Tanzanians to Tanzanian Arabs
4.1 The ‘Red’ Group
4.2 The ‘Yellow’ Group
4.3 The ‘Green’ Group
5 Conceptualization of Some African Tanzanians’ Negative Attitudes Towards Arabs
6 Perception of Geographical Destinations of the Arab Slave Trade and Ethnicity of Traders
7 One State, One Nation: Nyerere’s Legacy and the Arab Slave Trade in School Textbooks
8 Conclusion: Tanzanian Nation: Of Africans Only or All Citizens?
References
Between Ethnicity and Medicine: Reinventing Legitimacy in Chokwe and Sukuma Chieftaincies
1 Introduction
2 Medicine, Power, and Authority in Equatorial Africa
3 Medicinal Rule in Bulima and Busiha Chiefdoms
3.1 Chieftaincy as Initiatory Medicine
3.2 Rain Medicine in Bulima and a Chief’s Contested Legitimacy
3.3 The Death of Traditional Chieftaincy in Ndagalu
4 Ethnicity in Colonial Chieftaincy: The Case of the DRC
5 Festival-Based Chieftaincy and Inclusive Ethnicity: The Chokwe Case
6 Conclusion
References
Part II: Contested Authorities and State Power
By What Authority? Cosmology, Legitimacy, and the Sources of Power in Malawi
1 The Powers That Be in Malawi
1.1 Legalities, (il)Legitimacies, and Chosen Ones in Office
1.2 Traditions of Authority and the (a)Morality of Power
1.3 Charismatic Callings and (un)Holy Alliances
2 Weber in the Bush
2.1 Theory: Analytic Traditions
2.2 Application: Old Authorities in a New Field
2.3 Critique: Moralities of Power
3 Malawian and Global Authorities
References
Bittamo: Authority, Legitimacy, and Duty in Kara, Southern Ethiopia
1 Introduction
2 Legitimacy in Ethiopia
3 Authority in Kara
4 Bittamo as Duty
5 Becoming Bitti
References
In Search of Democracy: Gadaa as a Political Ideal, or the Legitimacy of Traditional Authority in Times of Turmoil and Unease
1 Introduction
1.1 What Is Democracy? Political Model, Utopia, or the ‘Vernacular’?
2 The Ethiopian Experience: The ‘Coming of Democracy’ and ‘Rebirth of Tradition’
2.1 Culture/Tradition as Capital
3 Gadaa Governance: The Tuulama Example
3.1 Gap or Continuity?
3.2 A ‘Bureaucratic Revolution’
4 Introduction of Leadership: The Position of Abbaa Gadaa
4.1 The Founding of the Abbaa Gadaa Council
5 Intangible Heritage
5.1 State Involvement and Material Impact
6 ‘Gadaa Democracy’: Re-Defining ‘Tradition’
6.1 Transmitting and Teaching ‘Gadaa’
7 Gadaa as a ‘National Icon’
7.1 Gadaa and Political Dissent
7.2 New Developments
8 Reformulating ‘African Democracy’: Renegotiating Definitional Power
References
Contested Authorities, International Experts, and the Quest for Social Justice: Negotiating Social Welfare in an African Setting
1 Introduction: The Amazing Otjivero
2 Authority, Power, and Legitimacy
3 Research Methods
4 Political Outline: Basic Income Grants in Namibia
5 Contested Authorities: Whose Claims Prevail?
5.1 Moral and Performative Legitimacy
5.2 Contested Authority
5.3 Political Allegiance, Loyalty, and Respect for the Elders
6 It’s Not Yet the End of BIG: Negotiating Social Protection Policy and Authority
7 Conclusion: Lessons on Authority and Legitimacy
References
Challenging Neotraditional Authority in Namibia
1 Introduction
2 What Is ‘Authority’? Three Theoretical Perspectives
3 Challenging Neotraditional Authority: A Case Study of the Topnaar Traditional Authority, Namibia
3.1 Quotas, Concessions, and Conflicts
3.2 The Topnaar ‘Youth Uprising’
4 Discussion and Concluding Remarks
References
Part III: Power and Authority over Space
Changes in Ethnicity and Land Rights Among the !Xun of North-Central Namibia
1 Introduction
2 Overview of the Research Area
3 The Development of a Plural Society
4 The Widespread Impact of Missionary Activities
5 Involvement of the San in the Liberation Movement
6 Developmental Activities on Behalf of the San
7 Conclusion
References
San Traditional Authorities, Communal Conservancies, Conflicts, and Leadership in Namibia
1 Introduction
2 San Traditional Authorities
3 Challenges to TA Authority and Communities in Nyae Nyae
4 Conclusion
References
Sacred Spaces, Legal Claims: Competing Claims for Legitimate Knowledge and Authority over the Use of Land in Nharira Hills, Zimbabwe
1 Introduction
2 Theoretical Framing
3 Background: Power and Its Practice in Zimbabwe
4 Case Study: Heritage and Land Use at Nharira Hills
5 Discussion: Ways of Making Authority Through Knowledge
5.1 On Petitioning for Rain
5.2 On Law
6 Conclusion
References
Case Law
Statutes, Ordinances and Regulations
Part IV: Conflict, (In)Justice, and Plural Legitimacies
A Magic Momentum: Negotiating Authority in the Bongolava Region, Madagascar
1 Introduction
2 Negotiating Authority, Legitimacy, and Violence in Africa
3 Negotiating Authority on Madagascar
3.1 A Long History of Insecurity, Self-Defense, and Search for Authority
3.2 A Murky Situation
4 Insecurity, Corruption, and the Question of Authority in the Bongolava Region
4.1 Methodological Note
4.2 Negotiating Legitimacy and Authority in the Bongolava Since 2009
5 A Magic Momentum
5.1 The ‘Children of Black’ and the ‘Red Scarfs’
5.2 The Meaning of Authority and Legitimacy in the Bongolava
6 Conclusion
References
Ungoverned Spaces and Informalization of Violence: The Case of Kenya Police Reservists (KPRs) in Baragoi
1 Introduction
2 State-Community Relations: Ungoverned Spaces and Violent Entrepreneurship in Kenya
3 Study Area and Methodology
4 History and the Institutional Structure of KPR in Kenya
5 From Kenya Police Reserves to National Police Reserves (NPRs)
6 KPRs and the Informalization of Violence in Northern Kenya
7 KPRs as Heroes on the Vanguard of Security Issues in Baragoi
8 KPRs and Violent Raids in Northern Kenya
9 KPRs, Arms, and the Politics of Violence in Samburu North
10 Privatization of KPRs in Samburu North
11 Chiefs as KPRs?
12 Conclusion
References
Secrecy and Visibility: Challenging Verwoerdism in South Africa’s Twentieth Century
1 Verwoerdism and Media: Introduction
2 Approach
3 Methods
4 The ‘Spell’ of Dr Hendrik F. Verwoerd
4.1 The God-Given Volksleier
5 State Television: Balance, Doubt and Outrage
5.1 The Story of Bara and Its Aftermath
5.2 Bara Within the Field of Documentary Media Production
6 New Media, New Authorities
7 Conclusions
References
Who Calls the Tune? Submission, Evasion, and Contesting Authorities in Ethiopian Refugee Camps
1 Introduction
2 The Setting: Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia
3 Ambivalent Actors in the Camp and Throughout Political Transformations
3.1 ARRA
3.2 UNHCR
3.3 NGOs
3.4 Eritrean Opposition Groups
3.5 The Local Population in Tigray Province
3.6 Criminal Networks
3.7 The Eritrean Government
4 Submission, Evasion, Disorientation
5 Trustworthy Authorities in Corrupted Human Life-Worlds
References
Index

Citation preview

Challenging Authorities Ethnographies of Legitimacy and Power in Eastern and Southern Africa Edited by Arne S. Steinforth · Sabine Klocke-Daffa

Challenging Authorities

Arne S. Steinforth  •  Sabine Klocke-Daffa Editors

Challenging Authorities Ethnographies of Legitimacy and Power in Eastern and Southern Africa

Editors Arne S. Steinforth Department of Anthropology York University Toronto, ON, Canada

Sabine Klocke-Daffa Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies University of Tübingen Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-76923-9    ISBN 978-3-030-76924-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated in love and gratitude to the memory of Rotraut Steinforth (1939–2020) and Gerhard Klocke (1931–2019)

Acknowledgements

This volume is the result of long-held and shared concern for investigating power and authority through an actor-centred lens that focuses strongly on solid ethnographic information to be analysed in a theoretically and/ or conceptually sound fashion. For us as co-editors, the first tentative steps towards engaging with this endeavour were taken at the conference “Mo(u)vement”, which was hosted jointly by the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) in Ottawa, 2017. From that point onwards, many colleagues have contributed, in one way or another, to bringing this project to fruition, and we are grateful for the part they all played in transforming the initially explorative ideas that sparked the discussion into a more substantive, academic argument. The first to be gratefully acknowledged for their role in initiating this publication project are the participants of that Ottawa conference panel “By Whose Authority: Investigating Alternative Modes of Power and the Legitimization of Expertise”, namely Walter Callaghan, Yanti M. Hölzchen, Nora Danielson Lanier, and Arnal Maud, and especially panel co-organizer and facilitator Sandra Widmer. We greatly appreciate the conversations their presentations have fostered, and we consider ourselves fortunate to build on the larger questions that they helped to formulate. Throughout the various stages towards its eventual completion, this book has continued to benefit from many colleagues and their inspired as well as inspiring efforts. Our thanks go to all contributors to this volume for their own fascinating work and the spirit of productive collaboration they established despite the vast geographical distances and unexpected vii

viii 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

circumstances of a global pandemic that were part of the shared experience. In addition to them, we further give thanks to Liazzat Bonate, Robert J.  Gordon, Steven Robbins, Thomas Widlok, and Olaf Zenker whose contributions, for different but similarly unfortunate reasons, could not be added to this volume. At Palgrave Macmillan, we are grateful for the support and expertise provided by Mary Al-Sayed and, later, Elizabeth Graber. We also appreciate the nuanced and insightful recommendations provided by the anonymous reviewers whose comments were of great value in further sharpening the profile of our volume during the last stages of its completion. We also want to give our thanks and our appreciation to Helene Helleckes, Judith Thanner, and Tobias Veeh for their work in copy-editing the manuscript, dotting the proverbial i’s and crossing the t’s that always tend to escape a writer’s own scrutiny. And finally, one of us (A.S.) would like to once more document his undying and heartfelt gratitude to Christine Durant for her tireless support and loving encouragement during times of ethnographic research, academic labour, pandemic lockdown, and the myriad challenges of daily life. Our thanks to you all.

Contents

 Introduction: Investigating Authority and Its Legitimization in Contemporary Africa  1 Arne S. Steinforth and Sabine Klocke-Daffa Part I Power and the (Post)Colonial State  27  Whose State? Whose Nation? Representations of the History of the Arab Slave Trade and Nation-Building in Tanzania 29 Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Anastasia A. Banshchikova, and Oxana V. Ivanchenko  Between Ethnicity and Medicine: Reinventing Legitimacy in Chokwe and Sukuma Chieftaincies 63 Koen Stroeken and Felix U. Kaputu Part II Contested Authorities and State Power  85  What Authority? Cosmology, Legitimacy, and the Sources By of Power in Malawi 87 Arne S. Steinforth

ix

x 

Contents

Bittamo: Authority, Legitimacy, and Duty in Kara, Southern Ethiopia121 Felix Girke and Dunga Nakuwa Batum  Search of Democracy: Gadaa as a Political Ideal, or the In Legitimacy of Traditional Authority in Times of Turmoil and Unease147 Andrea Nicolas  Contested Authorities, International Experts, and the Quest for Social Justice: Negotiating Social Welfare in an African Setting185 Sabine Klocke-Daffa  Challenging Neotraditional Authority in Namibia219 Mario Krämer Part III Power and Authority over Space 243  Changes in Ethnicity and Land Rights Among the !Xun of North-Central Namibia245 Akira Takada and Erika Miyake  San Traditional Authorities, Communal Conservancies, Conflicts, and Leadership in Namibia267 Robert K. Hitchcock, Wayne A. Babchuk, and Judith Frost  Sacred Spaces, Legal Claims: Competing Claims for Legitimate Knowledge and Authority over the Use of Land in Nharira Hills, Zimbabwe293 Shannon Morreira and Fiona Iliff Part IV Conflict, (In)Justice, and Plural Legitimacies 317  Magic Momentum: Negotiating Authority in the Bongolava A Region, Madagascar319 Peter Kneitz

 Contents 

xi

 Ungoverned Spaces and Informalization of Violence: The Case of Kenya Police Reservists (KPRs) in Baragoi347 Willis Okumu and Eric Mutisya Kioko  Secrecy and Visibility: Challenging Verwoerdism in South Africa’s Twentieth Century375 Julia Koch  Who Calls the Tune? Submission, Evasion, and Contesting Authorities in Ethiopian Refugee Camps405 Magnus Treiber and Mulu Getachew Abebe Index433

Notes on Contributors

Mulu Getachew Abebe  has written her MA thesis on the Mai Ayni refugee camp at Addis Ababa University in 2011–2012, which developed into her PhD research within the joint regional project “Borderland Dynamics in East Africa”—funded by NORHED and including Addis Ababa, Makerere, Khartoum Universities, and University of Bergen, Norway. Since then, she regularly visited her field sites in Mai Ayni, AdiHarush, and Hitsats and established very personal bonds with longstanding camp inmates. She took part in a large interview project among Eritrean refugees in six countries of transit and arrival run by Felsberg Institute in October 2016. Recently, she has been involved in the project “Transnational Figurations of Displacement” (TRAFIG) coordinated by the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), doing further research among Eritrean refugees in the camps and cities in Ethiopia. Wayne A. Babchuk  is Associate Professor of Practice in the Quantitative, Qualitative, and Psychometric Methods (QQPM) programme in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Nebraska-­ Lincoln (UNL). He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Kalahari Peoples Fund (KPF), an Executive Board Member of the Central States Anthropological Society (CSAS), Managing Editor for the Journal of Ethnographic and Qualitative Research (JEQR), and an instructor for the African Doctoral Academy at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is co-authoring three texts on ­qualitative and mixed methods research and one on ecotourism among indigenous groups.

xiii

xiv 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Anastasia A. Banshchikova  PhD (History), is a senior research fellow at the Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. Her main research interests are culture and cultural anthropology of ancient Egypt, perception of ancient Egypt in medieval Arab sources, historical memory of the slave trade and colonialism in modern Tanzania, German colonial legacy in modern Tanzania, and history of Bagamoyo. She has done fieldwork in Nigeria, Tanzania, Benin, and Rwanda. Dunga Nakuwa Batum  (LLB) has worked in various capacities for the Hamar District in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State (SNNPRS) in Ethiopia. He is the representative of Kara in the South Region Council and the House of Federation in Addis Ababa. Dmitri  M.  Bondarenko PhD (World History, Anthropology), is Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is Vice-­ Director of the Institute for African Studies. Bondarenko’s research interests include social, anthropological, and historical theory; political anthropology; culture and history of Africa south of the Sahara; socio-­ cultural transformations; and intercultural interaction with special focus on Africa and people of African descent worldwide. Bondarenko’s more than 500 publications include 7 monographs. Judith Frost  graduated from the University of Chicago and has a master’s degree in Urban Planning from NYU. After retiring from work as a research analyst for the New York City government, she has worked as an editor and writer, and as a volunteer with the Kalahari People’s Fund, including work with the Xomani San in the South African Kalahari. Felix Girke  is a postdoctoral researcher in Social/Cultural Anthropology and MA programme coordinator at the HTWG Konstanz - University of Applied Sciences. He has published the monograph The Wheel of Autonomy (2018) on intergroup relations and processes of differentiation in southern Ethiopia, and (co-)edited four books, most recently Anthropology as Homage: Festschrift for Ivo Strecker (2018). He is series editor of the Studies in Rhetoric and Culture (Berghahn) and editor-in-chief at Allegra Laboratory (http://allegralaboratory.net/). His recent research focused on the contemporary struggles over cultural heritage in urban Myanmar. Robert K. Hitchcock  obtained his PhD at the University of New Mexico in 1982 and is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He is also Adjunct Professor of Geography at

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xv

Michigan State University. Much of his work is on the human rights of indigenous people, small-scale farmers, and refugees, particularly those in Africa, the Middle East, and North America. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Kalahari Peoples Fund (KPF), a non-­profit 501(c)3 organization that assists disadvantaged people in southern Africa. Much of his ethnographic work is with the San (Bushmen) of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Hitchcock’s most recent book is People, Parks, and Power: The Ethics of Conservation-Related Resettlement (2020, with Maria Sapignoli). Fiona  Iliff is a Human Rights and Environmental Lawyer practising at Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights. She represents diverse communities and individuals in Zimbabwe advocating for equal protection of human rights. She completed her Bachelor of Laws degree at the University of Edinburgh, then specialized in human rights law completing an LLM in International Human Rights Law at the University of Essex. She qualified as a legal practitioner in England through Nottingham Law School, then returned home to Zimbabwe, where she cross-­qualified to Zimbabwean law. Her litigation, advocacy, and academic work cover all aspects of human rights law, with a particular focus on transitional justice and reparations law, anti-impunity claims, and environmental law. Oxana  V.  Ivanchenko is a junior research fellow of the Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, a junior research fellow of the Center for Scientific Design, Russian State University for the Humanities, and a junior research fellow of the International Center of Anthropology, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Her research interests include urban anthropology, sub-Saharan Africa, social movements, informal settlements, rotating savings and credit associations, mutual help groups, ethnic identity, socio-cultural processes in Tanzania, uswahilini. She has done fieldwork in Tanzania, Zambia, and Russia. Felix U. Kaputu  is Professor of English Literature from the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He obtained a joint PhD in Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies from Universiteit Gent and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research published in several books and articles focuses on religions (shamanism), gender and cultural studies, and identity construction patterns in global ­perspective. In this scope, he has spent the last years at the Universidade Federal de Minas

xvi 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Gerais in Brazil conducting research on the survival of central African religious culture in the Congado. As Fulbright Scholar at the University of California Santa Barbara, he is the recipient of awards for research stays among others at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Harvard University (at the W.E.B.  Du Bois Institute), Christian University of Tokyo, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, and Fordham University in New York. Eric Mutisya Kioko  is a social anthropologist based at the Department of Environmental Studies and Community Development, Kenyatta University, Kenya. His broad areas of research include peace and conflict, dynamics of ethnic relations, and the anthropology of megaprojects. His latest publications include cooperation in the midst of conflict (in Africa Journal), local peace committees and the legitimation of traditional peacemaking (in Journal of African-Centred Solutions in Peace and Security), and conflict resolution and crime surveillance in Kenya (in Africa Spectrum). He is also co-authoring four chapters on politics of aspiration and the transformation of rural Kenya, ungoverned spaces and informalization of violence, commodification and commercial exploitation of East Africa’s sandalwood, and environmental crimes in Kenya. Kioko is working as a co-investigator and country coordinator of a German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded Collaborative Research Centre, “Future Rural Africa: Future-Making and Social-­ Ecological Transformation”, which addresses large-scale land use changes and related social-ecological transformations along growth corridors in Eastern and Southern Africa. Sabine Klocke-Daffa  is a senior researcher and PD (Associate Professor) at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, Germany. She has been Deputy Professor at various German universities and is member of the Collaborative Research Center “ResourceCultures”, funded by the German Research Foundation. She has been working intensively in Southern Africa, focusing mainly on security and exchange relations, welfare grants, formal social insurances, and the cultural dynamics of resources. Key publications include an edited volume Applied Anthropology (2019), an article “Contested claims to social welfare – basic income grants in Namibia” (2017, in Sozialpolitik.ch), and “Resource Complexes, Networks, and Frames” (2017, in ResourceCultures). Peter  Kneitz  is a research fellow at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Martin Luther University Halle. University of

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xvii

Leipzig. He is working on “The Dynamics of Solidarity on Madagascar,” a research project funded by Horizon 2020 (2014–2020), the European Union’s Framework Program for Research and Innovation, under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant. Since 1999, he has been conducting field research on Madagascar, at first with a focus on the west coast, the Boeny kingdom, possession cult, rituals, and Sakalava shrines (Die Kirche der Sakalava, 2003). Since 2010, he is working on conflicts and conflict resolution, the impact of the normative notion of solidarity, and the historical turn from war to a preference given to negotiation and consent in public discourse (collective volume Fihavanana: La vision d’une société pacifique à Madagascar, 2016). Julia Koch  holds a PhD from Münster University via the graduate school of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics in Pre-modern and Modern Cultures”. She works at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Ethnographic Collection in Göttingen, Germany, where she teaches media anthropology courses. She studied Communications, Medieval History and Ethnology/Anthropology in Münster and Paris (EHESS). Her research on South African broadcasting grew out of her practical and theoretical interest in audio-visual communication in relation to social order. Recent publications include an ethnographic film on fieldwork methodologies in the setting of Indian-African migration and a paper on fieldwork as performance (in Anthropology Southern Africa). Mario Krämer  is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Köln, Germany. His main fields of research are political anthropology (chieftaincy and democratization, violent conflict, and social order) and the anthropology of sports. Since 2001, he has conducted about 30 months of fieldwork in Southern Africa, mainly in KwaZulu-­Natal (South Africa) and Namibia. Erika  Miyake  received her training and wrote her master thesis, Land Use and Its Influence on the Relationship Between San and Ovawambo in North-Central Namibia (2019) at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. After obtaining the master’s degree, she started her career at Sojitz Corporation, a global trading company based in Tokyo, in search for building win-win relationship between African local people and Japanese companies. Her main academic interests are land use in local areas and its effect on the social relationships

xviii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

among people living there. She has conducted intensive fieldwork in North-Central Namibia, Southern Vietnam, and small islands in Japan. Shannon Morreira  is a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Anthropology, and her research centres on the impact of coloniality on knowledge systems, including human rights law and alternative forms of justice, land use, migration, and higher education. She was editor of the Anthropology Southern Africa Journal from 2015 to 2019 and is the editor of Critical African Studies. Andrea  Nicolas  is a social anthropologist with a focus on Africa who holds her PhD at the Free University in Berlin. She worked at the Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Research in Halle and as part of the International MaxNetAging Program for the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. Later she was a member of the Graduate School “Cultural Contact and Scientific Discourse” at the University of Rostock. She is working at Goethe University Frankfurt/ Main, in the African studies section. In recent decades, Nicolas has carried out extensive fieldwork in Northeast Africa among the Oromo and Amhara of Ethiopia. She is the author of the book From Process to Procedure: Elders’ Mediation and Formality in Central Ethiopia (2011), and co-editor of the volumes Growing Up, Growing Old: Trajectories of Time and Lives (2013, with Ian Flaherty) and Travel, Agency, and the Circulation of Knowledge (2017, with Gesa Mackenthun and Stephanie Wodianka). Willis Okumu  is a researcher and peacebuilding coordinator at Anglican Development Services Kenya. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cologne. He is implementing an inter-communal Peacebuilding and Institutional Strengthening Project among the Maasai and Kipsigis in Narok County funded by Brot für die Welt and is Principal Investigator of “From Hope to Despair: An Ethnography of Youth Experiences of Human Trafficking Networks in Kenya”, a collaboration between Anglican Development Services Kenya, Anglican Alliance, and the Antislavery Knowledge Network, University of Liverpool. His research interests include human-­environment relations, inter-communal peacebuilding, and pastoralist livelihoods in the arid and semi-arid lands of Kenya. He previously worked as a Junior Researcher at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at University of Bonn under the Right Livelihood College (RLC)/DAAD Scholarship. He is Fellow of Africa Good Governance Network (AGGN) of the German Academic Exchange

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xix

Service (DAAD) and a Member of UKRI International Development Peer Review College (2018–2021). He is co-author (with Eric Kioko) of Appeasing the Land: Local Peace Committees and Co-management of Conflicts in Rural Kenya (2018), and The Role of Elite Rivalry and Ethnic Politics in Livestock Raids in Northern Kenya (2017, with Kaderi Bukari, Papa Sow, and Evans Onyiego). Arne  S.  Steinforth is a sessional lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. He obtained his PhD in social anthropology at the University of Münster, Germany. His recent research focuses on issues of power and religion, political cosmology, and mental disorder and social transformation, in the context of Southern and Eastern Africa. His major publications include the monograph Troubled Minds: On the Cultural Construction of Mental Disorder and Normality in Southern Malawi (2009) and the co-edited volumes Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies (2013, with Barbara Meier) and Spirit and Mind: Mental Health at the Intersection of Religion and Psychiatry (2017, with Helene Basu and Roland Littlewood). Koen  Stroeken is Associate Professor of Africanist Anthropology at Ghent University. Having done most of his ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern Africa, he authored two monographs on local concepts of power and healing, the first a micro-level analysis in a northern Tanzanian community (Moral Power, 2010), and the second a meso-level regional comparison (Medicinal Rule, 2018). His work continues the analysis at macro-level with an ‘entropology’ of eco-political transitions. Stroeken co-founded CARAM, the Centre for Anthropological Research on Affect and Materiality, which among others hosts collaborative research on restitution and initiatory objects at the Royal Museum of Central Africa. Since 2012 he coordinates a VLIRUOS-IUS academic exchange with Mzumbe University in Tanzania. Akira Takada  is an associate professor in Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. His academic interests include transformation of ethnicity in the contact zone, the influence of Christianity and Western education on indigenous societies, mutual construction of micro-habitat and habitus, and language socialization in caregiver-child interaction. He has conducted intensive field research in Namibia, Botswana, and Japan. He has published a number of books and articles, including Narratives on San Ethnicity: The Cultural and Ecological

xx 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Foundations of Lifeworld Among the !Xun of North-Central Namibia (2015) and The Ecology of Playful Childhood: Caregiver-Child Interactions Among the San of Southern Africa (2020). Magnus  Treiber is Professor of Anthropology at LMU Munich. Following his PhD research on young urban life in Asmara 2001–2005, he has done extensive research with Eritrean refugees and published his professorial thesis on migration from Eritrea (Migration aus Eritrea, 2017). He has taught at Munich, Bayreuth, and Addis Ababa Universities.

List of Figures

Whose State? Whose Nation? Representations of the History of the Arab Slave Trade and Nation-Building in Tanzania Fig. 1 Exposition on slavery and the slave trade in the National Museum, Dar es Salaam. (Photo by Oxana V. Ivanchenko) 37 Fig. 2 Representation of slaves carrying an elephant tusk. In the background, there is a social advertisement against attitude towards agricultural labour as slave labour (the same poster as in Karavan Serai, Fig. 3). National Museum, Dar es Salaam. (Photo by Anastasia A. Banshchikova) 38 Fig. 3 Social advertisement against discrimination of descendants of slaves, Karavan Serai, Bagamoyo. (Photo by Anastasia A. Banshchikova)40 Fig. 4 Figure of a porter at the entrance to Karavan Serai, Bagamoyo. The compound served as a hostel for free upcountry porters and a resting place for caravan owners, but locals mostly consider it to be a place for accumulation of slaves or a slave market. (Photo by Oxana V. Ivanchenko) 41 Fig. 5 Anglican Cathedral built by Bishop Edward Steere (Universities’ Mission to Central Africa) on the former slave marketplace. Stone Town, Zanzibar. (Photo by Dmitri M. Bondarenko) 49 Fig. 6 Group sculpture commemorating the slave trade by the Swedish sculptor, Clara Sörnäs, on the former slave market premises, next to the Anglican Cathedral. Stone Town, Zanzibar. (Photo by Dmitri M. Bondarenko) 50

xxi

xxii 

List of Figures

Bittamo: Authority, Legitimacy, and Duty in Kara, Southern Ethiopia Fig. 1 Map of South Omo Fig. 2 Protective plants laid out by the bitti and his aides across a path into the village Dus during a conflict between Kara and Nyangatom, November 2006. (Photo by Felix Girke)

126 135

In Search of Democracy: Gadaa as a Political Ideal or the Legitimacy of Traditional Authority in Times of Turmoil and Unease Fig. 1 First gadaa bureau of the Tuulama, a rented office space. Bishooftuu town (Debre Zeyt), East Shewa (Oromiyaa), July 2008. (Photo by the author) Fig. 2 Construction of new gadaa centre (galma gadaa) in Bishooftuu town (Debre Zeyt), East Shewa (Oromiyaa), June 2011. The compound has a generous outlay, with open-air spaces and room for several office buildings. (Photo by the author) Fig. 3 Gadaa statue in an urban centre. East Shewa (Oromiyaa), July 2011. (Photo by Lise Rangnes) Fig. 4 Gadaa assembly at Odaa Nabee. Odaa Nabee, East Shewa (Oromiyaa), June 2017. Members of the gadaa of Meelbaa hold their assembly next to Meelbaa’s odaa tree. (Photo by the author)

156

158 159 161

Contested Authorities, International Experts, and the Quest for Social Justice: Negotiating Social Welfare in an African Setting Fig. 1 View of Otjivero. (Photo by the author) Fig. 2 Otjivero women in front of their house. (Photo by the author) Fig. 3 Hierarchies and allegiance (Klocke-Daffa)

193 194 201

Challenging Neotraditional Authority in Namibia Fig. 1 Utuseb (Namibia), showing Topnaar monument and traditional office. (Photo by the author) Fig. 2 Topnaar community meeting in Utuseb (Namibia), October 2007. (Photo by the author)

235 236

Changes in Ethnicity and Land Rights Among the !Xun of NorthCentral Namibia Fig. 1 !Xun people weeding at the cooperative farm at Ekoka, 2000. (Photo by Akira Takada)

259

  List of Figures 

xxiii

San Traditional Authorities, Communal Conservancies, Conflicts, and Leadership in Namibia Fig. 1 Photograph of Tsamxao ≠Oma and community members, 1992. (Photo by Paul Weinberg) Fig. 2 Map of N≠a Jaqna and Nyae Nyae Conservancies, Namibia

272 273

A Magic Momentum: Negotiating Authority in the Bongolava Region, Madagascar Fig. 1 Distribution of the vigilantes Lambamena and Zazamainty in mid-­western Madagascar Fig. 2 Zazamainty near the village Andranomadio, March 2018 (Photo by the author) Fig. 3 The Lambamena of the village Antanetibe, April 28, 2018 (Photo by the author) Fig. 4 Badge issued by the SSTC (Photo by the author) Fig. 5 Two Zazamainty, village Andriambe, November 2017 (Photo by the author) Fig. 6 Badge of a Lambamena, village Marovavy, March 21, 2018 (Photo by the author) Fig. 7 Lambamena with their magic mirrors at the village Antsahatanteraka, April 25, 2018 (Photo by the author)

333 334 335 337 338 340 341

Ungoverned Spaces and Informalization of Violence: The Case of Kenya Police Reservists (KPRs) in Baragoi Fig. 1 Map of the study area that represents Baragoi (Samburu North Sub-­County) and indicates the locations (administrative units) of Samburu North Sub-­County. (Illustration by the authors)

354

List of Tables

San Traditional Authorities, Communal Conservancies, Conflicts, and Leadership in Namibia Table 1 Table 2

San traditional authorities in Namibia 271 Comparison of governance and land resource management strategies in two Tsumkwe district conservancies, N≠a Jaqna and Nyae Nyae 283

Ungoverned Spaces and Informalization of Violence: The Case of Kenya Police Reservists (KPRs) in Baragoi Table 1

Data on KPRs and their firearms in Samburu North Sub-County

357

xxv

Introduction: Investigating Authority and Its Legitimization in Contemporary Africa Arne S. Steinforth and Sabine Klocke-Daffa

1   Authority, Power, and Legitimacy in a Post-Factual World When the notion of ‘alternative facts’ and the alleged dawning of a ‘post-­ factual’ world first entered globalized public discourses in the aftermath of the 2016  U.S. presidential elections, many social anthropologists found themselves in unexpectedly familiar territory. To them, it may have felt as if their fieldwork had followed them back home. Every anthropologist whose research has confronted them with, for example, local conceptions of religion or witchcraft, allegedly ‘traditional’ (read: non-scientific) forms of healing, ‘traditional’ (read here: non-democratic) political structures,

A. S. Steinforth (*) Department of Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] S. Klocke-Daffa (*) Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_1

1

2 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

or similar local aspects of social life had to straddle the often-quoted cognitive dissonance that comes with apparently incompatible views on reality competing over what is accepted as factual. Fact, as ‘true knowledge’, derives its explanatory as well as political power from social mechanisms of legitimization, thereby demonstrating the deep and dubious interconnection between knowledge accepted as truth and power structures accepted as legitimate, further highlighting the sometimes troubling, uncomfortable experience of fact as a continually contested, volatile social category. Questions of what is and what ought to be considered as fact are inextricably tied to questions of authority, with any contestation of accepted ‘truth’ signifying a challenge to the authorities upholding it—and, in turn, upheld by it. With increased popular concerns of clandestine conspiracies pulling the wool over the global public’s eyes (see Lagalisse 2019; Rabo 2020; West and Sanders 2003), authorities—representing as well as legitimized by some degree of shared truth—are under intense, even anxious scrutiny. Authority itself, it seems, is in crisis. With the numerous and obvious challenges—be they social, political, or more epistemological in nature—it entails, this perspective serves as the logical launchpad for taking a fresh, ethnographically informed, and theoretically inclined look at authority. For anthropologists—and especially those working in and on African societies—the juxtaposition, opposition, even outright competition between different postulated authorities is decidedly familiar territory that, at the same time, still warrants further in-­depth analysis for these territories to be located on the global roadmaps of larger theoretical discussions.

2   Conceptual Clarifications Ethnographic investigations into the various dimensions of power and authority clearly demarcate the diverse levels that all need to be addressed in order to establish a deeper understanding of emic perspectives. As a rudimentary starting point, it may be helpful to constitute power not merely as the ability of an individual or group to influence or outright control the behaviour of people against all odds, as Max Weber proposes (1922, p. 28). Rather, power can be conceptualized to also include the use and (possible) manipulation of networks which are essential for the implementation of programs, ideas, and political concepts (see Adams 1977). And, as Michel Foucault convincingly demonstrates, power may prove itself equally oppressive as productive—because it is engaged in the

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

3

production of reality itself (Foucault 1977). The way power is and can be used therefore depends significantly on the authority granted and acknowledged by others. In the broadest sense, authority denotes a social relationship of superiority and subordination—an ‘accepted leadership’ exercised by individuals, governments, religious institutions, or scientific experts, to name some of the most obvious fields of application. And while legitimacy may be defined as the justification and acceptance of authority, not every form of power necessarily goes along with authority, and a claim for authority may well be conceived of as illegitimate. Furthermore, classificatory overlaps such as authoritative power, moral legitimacy without political power, and non-hierarchical authority (see discussion of the terms below) clearly demonstrate that any attempt at scientifically analysing power, authority, and legitimacy is far from a straightforward academic exercise. In order to develop a more ethnographically sound understanding of the specific social mechanisms of leadership and authority, we need to launch more in-depth investigations into the quality of social (and socio-cosmological) relationships and the acceptance as well as rejection of power in context. Much has already been accomplished. Within the past two decades or so, the literature on legitimacy and authority in African postcolonial settings has proliferated, fuelled by the dynamics of ever-faster processes of globalization. The internationalization of research and the growth of interdisciplinary cooperation have contributed substantially to bridging the divide between social and political sciences. This has enabled researchers to focus on political processes and actors from different scientific perspectives, taking a look at ‘traditional’ systems and forms of neo-traditional authority as well as the particularities of modern governance, and conducting multi-level research on the micro as well as the macro levels of analysis (see, e.g., Herbst 2014, Oomen 2005, and edited volumes by Adejumbi 2018; Koechlin and Förster 2015; Vaughan 2005). What has somehow been neglected are the answers, solutions, and counter-­models initiated by those we are dealing with: the alternative, resistant, creative, subversive, sometimes oppressive, sometimes liberating, manifest or clandestine ways of acting with, within, or against power relations. Whereas the details of institutional settings and processes of doing politics have been intensively studied, the actors often remain somehow distant, underexposed, and reduced to bit parts in a larger victim-­ perpetrator dichotomy that results from binary perspectives on power as a zero-sum game pitting the Powerful against the Powerless. It, therefore,

4 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

seems analytically expedient and scientifically productive to focus the investigation on the groundwork processes of authority-building, power-holding, and legitimacy-claiming. Given the fact that globalized news (whether ‘true’ or ‘fake’) are increasingly flooding even the most remote places of the world, that equally globalized but often incomprehensible expert knowledges infringe on the bastions of political decision-­ making, and that nation-states claiming legitimacy often lack the means (or political will) to act as engaged authorities for and with their citizens, the simple and yet ultimately complex question is: how do these dynamics play out and intersect in real human lives? As anthropologists dedicated to taking people seriously, we must look into the options that are tentatively and ostentatiously exercised for better or worse, the concepts hidden behind accepted authorities, and the explanations given as to the sources of power. To be sure: this exercise runs the risk of crossing the line of what is considered acceptable within Western democracies. It may seem to turn history upside down, proclaim the truth of shady correlations formerly and conveniently dismissed as primitive or superstitious, or invoke secret knowledge to legitimize a demonstrably unjust ideology against the many for the sake of individual profit or a ‘just cause’. To consider all details of ethnographic record as holding equal value is a genuinely anthropological approach. Applying such a holistic perspective allows for a hermeneutical analysis that may lead us to understand the crucial specificities of social context. This epistemological interest thus defines the overall question to this volume as How are power relations exercised or leveraged according to emic constructions of authority and legitimacy? Within this overall framework, guiding questions include: How do contested forms of power and authority merge into new regimes of legitimacy? Who are the actors, and what are the resources (e.g. religious, political, economic, media-related) that are appropriated, activated, or transformed? Which are the social institutions actively involved in negotiating legitimization and delegitimization? And what are the specific conceptual frameworks underlying such processes? The contributions collected in this volume explore the variety of ways in which authority is defined and contested in African societies, particularly with the expansion of global institutions and the rapid spread of universalizing forms of knowledge. Generating heterogeneous realities across different settings, these globalized developments urge questions concerning which institution, what kind of knowledge, or whose expertise is accepted as authoritative—questions indicating complex processes of

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

5

negotiation that highlight the specificities and pluralities in contemporary societies. The inherent contradictions between what is perceived as local vis-à-vis global forms of knowledge, between different discourses vying for social acceptance and legitimacy, characterize these developments as an open-ended process that questions traditions, creates spaces, transforms hierarchies, and re-prioritizes values.

3   Authorities in Context Like its numerous neighbouring disciplines, anthropology has a long and colourful history of engaging with notions of authority. From the early to mid-twentieth century onward, anthropological work started to apply the concept to analyse cultural structures of community and kin-group leadership within empirical as well as comparative perspectives (e.g. Asad 1970; Doctorow 1963; Miller 1955; Richards 1964; West 1998; Willis 2001), sometimes qualifying their focus as ‘political authority’ (e.g. Ember 1962; Freeman 1964; Lindholm 1986) or as explicitly religious in character (e.g. Beidelman 1971; Bloch 1974; Middleton 1960). The fundamental recognition of authority as always socially constructed rather than normatively predefined, as culturally validated and individually more often contested than accepted, is the result of a long and arduous process that required the turnover of cherished analytical models as well as critical self-reflection and painful self-exposure on the part of Eurocentric academia itself. In the early days of social anthropology, modernist paradigms underlying European/North American efforts to chart its global Other led to a categorical and systematic dismissal of local knowledge systems as untrue, as representations of a ‘pre-factual’ world that had not entered the ostensibly enlightened, rational, disenchanted era of scientific investigation and falsification. Social evolutionist frameworks and their ethnocentric, ideological rationalization of cultural difference as indicative of ‘higher’ versus ‘lower’ levels of social development consistently identified non-European knowledge systems (Comte 1853), structures of political organization (Tylor 1871), technologies and social institutions (Morgan 1877), cosmologies (Frazer 1890), and other aspects of life as structurally inferior to their European (and, by global extension, colonist) counterparts. Even after the long overdue deconstruction of evolutionist metanarratives in social anthropology, a number of theoretical schools within the social sciences continued to entertain broadly neo-evolutionist

6 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

perspectives. For a long time, classical modernization theory postulated modernization as a process that—through necessary mechanisms such as industrialization, urbanization, democratization, rationalization, secularization, and individualization—transformed formerly ‘traditional’ societies into ‘modern’ ones (see Parsons 1966; Weber 1930). When social sciences finally started questioning these ideological bastions of Western exceptionalism by assessing that “we have never been modern” (Latour 1993) or that “we have always been modern—sometimes” (Stroeken 2010, p. 16), some of the foundational tenets of the Western construction of the world became untenable—including classificatory dichotomies of a First and Third World, of developed and underdeveloped (or developing) countries, of the West and the Rest (Hall 1992; Kahn 2001; Nader 2015). In its wake, the demystification of modernity further entails dispensing with obsolete notions of tradition and the all too colonial ideologies they codify. Whereas many contemporary African idioms continue to argue in terms of ‘traditional authorities’, ‘traditional healers’, or ‘local tradition’, these references reveal themselves as strictly discursive, relative markers that offer insights into local narratives of continuity and discontinuity, of Own and Other—rather than ‘true’, analytically solid representations of a presumedly stable, ahistorical, primordial status quo. With the axiomatic redefinition of all tradition as ‘invented’ (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), any analysis of local ‘traditions’ is transformed into an effort at unravelling the historical boundedness and fluidity that governs strategic allocations of what sets the old and endemic features of society apart from the new and foreign. This same general consideration also applies to the notion of the tribe, that stereotypical, dead yet undying model of African social structure that has featured as a long-time epithet of African ‘tradition’. Whether referred to as ‘tribes’ or, arguably less primitivizing, as ‘ethnic groups’, these demographic entities should be understood, not unlike nations, as imagined communities (Anderson 1983). As socially constructed and largely colonial institutions, they are grounded not in immovable empirical factualities but in historical contingencies, ideological conventionalities, and political instrumentalities. The notion of tribalism or ethnicity thus continues to inform local articulations of shared identity and difference in many parts of Africa. It needs to be understood within this area of conflict: of its character as ‘genuinely African’ idiom of social classification with very real impact on political organization and national distribution and negotiation of power on the one hand, and as a historical artifact and remnant of the

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

7

colonially expedient ‘creation of tribes’ (Iliffe 1979, p.  318–341; Vail 1989) that “lay at the heart of indirect rule” (Ranger 1983, p. 250) in many parts of colonized Africa on the other. Nevertheless, the notion of ‘tribe’ is a blurred category experiencing something of a renaissance in recent decades, proactively brought back to the surface and used for delimitation by those, of all people, who should never have been designated by the seemingly colonial term of ‘tribes’ in the first place—such as Namibian Nama groups referring to each other as tribes (in Afrikaans: stamme) and all those who use the term within the political contexts of tribal councils, tribal communal lands, and tribal authorities. Anthropologists may not be too pleased about this kind of seemingly politically incorrect wording. Based on these general considerations, authority—as the expression of specific social strategies of allocation and contestation exposed to competing local discourses on ‘tradition’ and innovation, legitimacy and illegitimacy, conditionality and illimitability—emerges as a category in need of careful investigation. Analytically, academic definitions of the term have been far from unified and, in many cases, far from coherent. While most theoretical contributions define authority somewhere in the larger conceptual vicinity of power, there seems to be no general consensus as to the precise relationship between the two. Some consider authority as power legitimized (Weber 1922), as legitimacy and meaning rendered onto power itself (Arendt 1970, 1961; Furedi 2013), or as a specific technique of power in one of its many dimensions (Lukes 1974), yet others regard the two as fundamentally opposed, even mutually exclusive principles (Fried 1967; Skalník 1999, 1996). Other authors use the terms almost interchangeably, insisting that “Authority over others may be acquired by superior force, inherited office, material generosity, or other means; but the power to do or be so is itself deemed that of ancestors, gods, or other external metapersons who are the sources of human vitality and mortality” (Graeber and Sahlins 2017, p.  3). However, the concept of authority remains contested territory when contrasted with notions of legitimacy. While some authors continue to understand authority as society’s collective frame of reference by which normativity is defined (Durkheim 1974), others argue that authority is indeed independent from notions of morality and legitimacy (Sennett 1980). That dilemma seems tentatively resolved by J. Michael Williams’ (2010) notable contribution that analyses authority entirely through the interplay between the two alternative strategies of moral vis-à-vis performative legitimacy. Overall, however, most scholarly

8 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

applications of the term have—implicitly or explicitly—maintained the Weberian understanding that, without being legitimized within society, authority degenerates into sheer, ‘brute’ power based on oppression and violence.1 In an ever-transforming and pluralistic global environment, the analytical distinction between legitimate/consensual versus illegitimate/oppressive power is nowhere near as simple as we might like it to be. According to Stanley Barrett, authority—in the sense of legitimized and institutionalized power—“is essentially ideology which serves the interests of the class or party capable of defining what is legitimate. In other words, authority looks very much like manipulation, because it depends on members of the other classes unwittingly acquiescing to interests that are not their own” (Barrett 2002, p. 68). With classical concepts in the analysis of power— such as cultural hegemony (Gramsci 1971), power/knowledge (Foucault 1980, 1977), cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986), or tactical and organizational power (Wolf 1990)—jumping to mind, we find ourselves once again thrown back on the social specificities: on the exact processes by which societies construct their own realities, including their ostensibly preordained power structures and the allegedly primordial truths they represent. When conceived of not as an apriori, quasi pre-cultural fact—and ontological given of human existence—but as the result of specific and localized processes of social construction (see Berger and Luckmann 1966), power, authority, and legitimacy dissolve into what, for the sake of a meaningful ethnographically centred analysis at the very least, they should be: features of society, grounded in specific historical processes, and increasingly confronted with alternative versions of themselves, global and local, struggling for their share in a truly global marketplace of ideas. It is here that the present volume seeks to latch on to the discussion.

1  Accordingly, those anthropology textbooks that do offer a definition of authority tend to specify it in terms of a “right to make and enforce public policy” (McCurdy et  al. 2016, p. 217), a status of being “recognized by a political community to make decisions on their behalf” (Kurtz 2001, pp. 40–41), or the “use of legitimate power” (Muckle and González 2016, p. 269).

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

9

4   Diverse Authorities in African Settings Within North American and European popular discourse, power often features as a function and inherent marker of institutionalized sociopolitical structures. In a democratic system, the question of who can legitimately make decisions within and for the community marks the core of its very conception, a notion of legitimate power vested in ‘the people’ defined as electorate who—through their vote and active participation, and within an existing framework of rule of law, established bureaucratic mechanisms, and accepted political institutions—temporarily transfer decision-making privileges to selected individuals. Marxist and post-­ Marxist critiques, both academic (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Ferguson 1994; Gledhill 2000; Graeber 2011) and popular, however, emphasize the hidden, extra-parliamentary power represented by corporations, billionaires, and networks of political insiders who, as controllers of either the means of production or political processes with vested personal interests, undermine and delegitimize the ‘true power of the people’ as shadowy and often elusive, faceless financial elites. These same political theories typically form the backdrop of scholarly analyses of power in African societies. A stated lack of ‘democratization’ within social structures is often explained by low degrees of education or ‘development,’ however defined, and the local as well as global forces of partisan interest groups—tribalism and nepotism, corruption and plutocracy, neocolonialism and economic deregulation—are identified as (more or less) secret makers of policy and factual holders of power that is, thereby, rendered tyrannical and illegitimate. Other perspectives stress the longevity of local traditions of power as held by chieftains and warlords, by kinship dynasties and elders, by an inherited order of things and its ostensibly timeless validity. And yet other accounts further acknowledge the existence of even more cryptic forces, of locally held spiritual beliefs and ritual practices, of ideas about ‘higher’ powers influencing the sociopolitical here and now, thus conveniently completing the list of Max Weber’s (1922) tripartite understanding of authority (Herrschaft) as legitimized in legal, traditional, or charismatic terms. In Africanist anthropology, the concept of authority frequently features in the form of ‘traditional authority’, following Meyer Fortes’ and Evans-­ Pritchard’s comprehensive volume on African Political Systems (1940). By the 1990s at the latest, intensive (re)studies focused their attention on traditional authorities (e.g. Buur and Kyed 2007; Oomen 2005; Ubink

10 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

2008; Vaughan 2010; von Kessel and Oomen 1997; West and KloeckJenson 1999)—a term that, while mirroring Weber’s seminal classification, usually references the official terminology applied in many contemporary African countries for village chiefs, headpersons, and local leaders. With such social roles representing a set of ‘alternative’, that is, non-state sociopolitical authorities, usage of the concept already underscores the plurality and ambiguity of authority that we will elaborate on in more detail below. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century discussions have employed the concept in order to critically reflect anthropologists’ own authoritative claims in representing someone else’s social reality (Clifford 1983; Eriksen and Nielsen 2013; Kuipers 2013; Nencel and Pels 1991; Sangren 1988), again highlighting the contested and controversial nature of authority as a potentially unjustified privilege and an expression of deeply entrenched, even naturalized power imbalances rather than tacit consent. The drawn-out but analytically—and morally—indispensable farewell to long-held European glorifications of its own sociohistorical transformation as a unique quantum leap unrivalled in human history has created much-needed space for less partial thinking. Along with the postmodern critique of universalist ideologies, postcolonial critical theory challenges globalized power structures, decolonizes ‘native intellectuals’ and their knowledge (Fanon 1961), de-orientalizes cultural representations of Africa (Said 1978), re-conceptualizes historical scenarios of colonial difference (Bhabha 1994), and reclaims an Africa that never was anyone’s “absolute Other” (Mbembe 2001) to begin with. Any investigation into African social and cultural configurations on their very own terms—instead of through a Eurocentrically tinted conceptual lens crusted with centuries of ideological residue—must be a postcolonial exercise. In their own specific ways and on various levels, the contributions to this volume engage in this enterprise. But the end of grand metanarratives not only liberates the debate from the heavy conceptual baggage of the past—it delivers its own intellectual load of uncertainty, ambiguity, and plurality that may, at times, be difficult to manoeuvre. In some cases, the uncomfortable coexistence of separate sets of facts that, by rational secularist standards, would have to be considered mutually exclusive, has a tendency of becoming painfully graphic during field research. For one of us (A.S.), it was during the first days of his full-year Ph.D. field research that a Malawian university professor (of Oxford University credentials, no less) cum Catholic priest addressed

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

11

questions about local concepts of witchcraft by relating that, clearly, Europeans and North Americans had their problems accepting the factuality of such phenomena. But that he himself, despite all the Western reservations he was all too familiar with, had seen his priestly robes catch on fire by themselves while hanging in the closet, had witnessed human-shaped creatures fly overhead at night, and had personally experienced communal rituals heal the incurably sick. And, in a remarkable inversion of stereotypical colonizer-colonized relationships, he expressed his generous understanding for his European counterpart’s failure to accept these ‘facts’. But facts they were. They represented the ‘alternative’ facts that the researcher had to accommodate, if not appreciate, if he wanted to establish any analytical inroads into understanding reality in this particular African society. For the second author (S.K.D.), it came rather as a surprise to find out more about the respect deemed appropriate towards powerholders without power and highly validated loyalty towards individuals accorded authority against all external pressures. In the years of utter dispute over a social welfare program, the gratitude of beneficiaries directed towards the main promoter was—as stated repeatedly—not due to personal persuasiveness and never-fading energy but rather to him acting as a mediator of heavenly gifts transmitted by the LORD—being conceptualized as the original initiator of the project. After years of research on social security mechanisms, this wasn’t astounding, but what was really astonishing was the fact that in none of the many publications on the subject this emic perception of an extra-human source of power and legitimacy was ever mentioned. In the years to come, when that same person was politically attacked from various opponents for failing in the case, his moral authority on the local level never seemed to dwindle while his personal loyalty towards his superiors was unchallenged in full conviction that the LORD would eventually intervene for the legitimate cause—as HE did, apparently. Personal fieldwork experiences such as these—and observations from many other contexts of African societies—represent the everyday dimension of the local epistemologies of authority that the contributions in this volume investigate in more empirical detail and in greater theoretical depth.

12 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

5   On This Volume This collection is divided into four parts that tentatively establish general thematic units, although some themes overlap. The contributions to the individual parts are in no way comprehensive, but they do provide an insightful view of emic conceptions of authority, legitimacy, and power within the context of their selected Southern and Eastern African settings. Taken together, the chapters in this book underline the fact that many African countries draw heavily on historical processes in respect to the particular formation of power constellations which need to be taken into consideration for a full understanding of correlations as well as conceptualizations of the sources of authority and power. Nevertheless, it would be too narrow a view to focus only on historical events and to disregard current developments, the continuing importance of cultural institutions, and the influence of individual actors. Neither can the failure of entire states in today’s world be ignored, nor the creative— and sometimes distressed—collective solutions of population groups who feel left alone. Unsolved problems in connection with the recognition of authority, the granting of legitimacy, and the perception of powerholders become apparent when analysis starts at the micro-level of local problems and negotiation processes rather than remaining at the macro-level of state institutions. Then, we see which kind of individual or social potentials are used or remain unused, which secret connections are or have been effective in supporting or undermining authority, where authority is (or, maybe more fittingly, pluralized authorities are) controversial, and where traditional structures are being given new appreciation. 5.1  Power and the (Post)Colonial State The contributions in this first part of the volume focus on the historical aspects of authority, legitimacy, and power, reflecting the fact that any such constellation must take history into consideration. Within the context of Southern and Eastern Africa—as in most contemporary African countries—the heritage of colonialism cannot be overlooked, and neither can it be overstated. Many of the political discourses on the post-colony only become comprehensible in the light of previous colonial administrations, hegemonic structures, and racial inequalities. Some states, however, have found their own ways to develop a postcolonial national identity. Since collective heritage may be used as a political instrument, historical

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

13

facts are sometimes reinterpreted or simply ignored for the sake of the greater cause. In their contribution, Dmitri M.  Bondarenko, Anastasia A.  Banshchikova, and Oxana V.  Ivanchenko demonstrate how Tanzanian narratives on the East African slave trade for the most part disregard the role of Arab traders in order to politically and socially integrate Tanzanians of Arab descent. State power provides for the manipulation of historical correlations in public narratives up to the textbooks of schoolchildren, ignoring the ‘dark side of history’ by shifting the discourse from slavery to colonialism. Presenting the slave trade as part of the colonial system allows for blaming Europeans for the atrocities of the past. With African and Arabian Tanzanians thus being legitimate heirs of an undisputed and shared precolonial heritage, neither state authority nor historical evidence is seriously queried. Writing about leadership among Sukuma- and Chokwe-speaking groups in Eastern Tanzania and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Koen Stroeken and Felix Kaputu trace the process by which traditional and hybrid forms of legitimacy among local chiefdoms emerged. These institutions have been heavily influenced by colonial structures of administration as well as today’s national policies. Tanzania’s Sukuma communities have revitalized the traditional chiefly authorities whose status rests upon access to cosmic powers and ‘life-medicine’, granting the chiefs social reputation and awe among their communities. The source of their power is much different from the authority of the elders based on seniority and respect. As opposed to this, Chokwe chiefdoms in DRC represent a hybrid type of authority. Just like the Sukuma chiefs, the source of their legitimacy is rooted in ancestral and cosmic powers, but their political and social functions prevail—due to the fact that their very existence as political institutions dates back to colonial times when ethnic representation was vital. This type of hybrid traditional-modern authority is corroborated by an annual initiation festival for the ancestors, attracting large crowds of Chokwe and others from DR Congo, Zambia, Angola, and even Chokwe diaspora groups. 5.2   Contested Authorities and State Power The lending of power to individual persons or single institutions may be rooted in quite differently conceptualized sources, just as authority need not be accompanied by political powers in the sense of decision-making

14 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

privileges. Both can coexist in parallel or mutually complementary spheres. In many cases, religion and cosmic forces play a vital role in legitimizing power, thus extending Western dichotomies of good and evil, rightfulness and illegitimacy, onto the political realm. This constellation may or may not clash with state institutions and its representatives where authority comes to be contested or negotiated to the point of merging and mutual recognition. Focusing on Malawi, Arne S.  Steinforth analyses local concepts of power and authority as based on their cosmological frames of reference. Elected political leaders and their accomplishments are assessed in public discourse through religious conceptions that serve to allocate or justify the legitimacy of their positions. Their authority must not necessarily be legitimized by blood relations, as maintained for traditional authorities, but rather as a divine gift—which is conceived to be open to misuse. This constitutes the moral ambiguity of power lying beyond the charisma of the individual. Allegations of Malawian politicians using occult knowledge to gain access to the power of supra-human sources are notorious. The three examples presented in this contribution clearly show the multifaceted notions of power and the analytical limitations of etic concepts of authority and charisma. Challenging Western concepts and definitional hegemony as constituent of the ‘postcolonial turn’ not only requested a reinterpretation of indigenous concepts but also cast new light on existing institutions and ‘traditions’. Two papers on traditional authorities in Eastern Africa, mainly Ethiopia, illustrate how different approaches and ‘claims-making’ to power may result in specific forms of national (des)integration. Writing about the bittamo authority among Kara groups in Southern Ethiopia close to the border of Kenya and South Sudan, Felix Girke together with Dunga Nakuwa Batum (himself a future Kara office-holder) pick up on the question of ‘modelling authority’ and what it means to become a bitti, the individual ritual leader of the group. Even though state representatives are decisive in the area and many times harassing in political affairs, they lack legitimacy among the local population. There is no way around the traditional leaders even though they do not possess power in the common sense of the word, have not much to demand and nothing to decide. The chapter focuses on the actors rather than on political structures and sheds light on the many times neglected side-aspects of alternative authority such as personal integrity, accountability, and dedication.

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

15

Andrea Nicolas’ chapter on the traditional gadaa system of Ethiopian and Kenyan Oromo analyses the symbolic value of this age and generational organization. Having been rejected as an outmoded symbol of tribalism by state authorities for decades, gadaa recently received recognition as an example of an ‘indigenous democracy’ in the course of the country’s political transformations of the 1990s. Today it stands for a counter-model to political authority and legitimacy of a genuinely national and ethnic background and may lead to a reformulation of African political organization. Whether it will indeed be a success story remains to be seen. Increased interest was not least due to the fact that it can be instrumentalized to serve state-political agendas and is thus equally courted by political parties, traditional authorities, and charismatic individuals in their rivalling attempts to gain political legitimacy. Individual charisma may be a challenge to political power where moral authority is claiming priority. Sabine Klocke-Daffa, writing about a highly controversial project of social welfare in Namibia, analyses the hidden dimensions of power relations and personal allegiance that led to the (temporal) failing of the project’s implementation on a national level. Integrating a former protestant Bishop and fervent supporter of the project into government raised expectations of subsequent success due to the publicly perceived urgency of the cause and his personal charisma. However, despite moral authority and political experience his neglecting established forms of performing legitimacy and power was ultimately decisive since authority was claimed by many stakeholders in the process. In his chapter on popular conceptions of traditional authorities in Namibia, Mario Krämer describes the dilemma connected to institutionalized power being challenged by popular distrust. Despite constitutional recognition and a firm standing on the level of the nation, many of these institutions do not have a long history. Neither undisputed within their communities nor managed in a particularly professional manner, their legitimacy depends on the individual integrity and moral authority of the title holder. This may turn out to be difficult, as demonstrated in the example of the Topnaar Nama, where the exercise of official authority goes along with economic benefits—causing open critique by traditionally ‘unauthorized’ members of the younger generation.

16 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

5.3  Power and Authority over Space Conflicts over authority and legitimacy are exacerbated when meeting the burning queries over land use and ownership. The three chapters in this part of the volume each highlight one particular facet of this multidimensional phenomenon. Focusing once again on Namibia, the first contribution in this section investigates the contentious issue regarding ongoing disputes over land rights of the San, former hunters and gatherers who today are said to be the most marginalized population of the country. Akira Takada and Erika Miyake, working with the !Xun of Northern Namibia along the border to Angola, describe local processes of negotiating with authoritative powers. As a small population confronted with external dominant power holders in the area, the !Xun more than other San communities have always been relying on manageable relations with surrounding groups and shifting authorities: Ovawambo agriculturalists, Protestant Missions, South African Army Divisions, and governmental institutions of independent Namibia. Flexibility and obsequiousness were useful strategies to promote for marginal social integration but increasingly led to controversial claims on land which reflects a larger struggle also experienced by other San groups. Robert K.  Hitchcock, Wayne A.  Babchuk, and Judith Frost are approaching this topic from a different perspective, examining the roles and activities of traditional San authorities. Their chapter focuses on the two largest San communal conservancies in Namibia, Nyae Nyae and N/a Jaqna, inhabited by Ju/’hoansi and !Kung faced with conflicts over land allocation and community decision making. While traditional authorities cooperate with official Communal Land Boards and jointly remain responsible to the government’s Ministry of Regional and Local Government, Housing, and Rural Development, there is no legal obligation for them to consult with their constituents on such sensitive topics as land alienation. This causes ongoing distrust and allegations of misuse of power. San communities want their leaders to behave equitably and to ensure transparency, accountability, and social justice. It becomes evident that to deal with these problems requires clarification of the roles of traditional authorities and to make them more responsive to the people whom they represent. Writing from Zimbabwe, Shannon Morreira and Fiona Iliff describe the contestation over land claims between a community and the state, reaching a point where Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights got

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

17

involved. The subsequent process was the outcome of a dispute between a traditional authority, state institutions, and a mining company following the eviction of the plaintiffs from their place of residence near Nharira Hills, held to be a sacred area and national heritage site. For the community, the rain ceremonies performed at the hills are conceived of as guaranteeing the social and cosmological reproduction of life, while the National Museums and Monuments Association uses its authority to safeguard a monument of national concern—and whereas the mining company as well as some state authorities consider the economic value of the land as tantamount. Arguing that epistemic pluralism is a key feature of postcolonial settings, the authors analyse the kinds of alternative authorities at play and the ways in which knowledge, power, and politics can be unfolded in space. 5.4  Conflict, (In)Justice, and Plural Legitimacies When power and authority are perceived as misused, intransparent, or ignorant of the interests of the people without the chance for betterment, populations may decide to take matters into their own hands. Equally so, those in fear of losing power may utilize clandestine networks to control and stabilize political, economic, or social positions. By finding their own ways of resolving problems, new authorities appear on the scene, some of them legitimized by nominally illegal means. One option is to leave the country—only to meet new contested authorities. Peter Kneitz describes what it means to act within a world of plural legitimacies in Madagascar—on the one hand the state whose authorities are mostly unable to grant effective security against increasing cattle rustling in rural areas; on the other vigilante groups securing a fragile protection from ever more dangerous gangs of bandits. Legitimized by the villagers themselves, their work is based on a magic worldview dating back to precolonial times. While state (modern, secularized) authority is certainly a new kind of authority, it is embedded in a long-standing cultural pattern of managing a situation of plural authorities. Violent conflicts on cattle raids and the state’s inability to govern pastoral landscapes is also addressed by Willis Okumu and Eric Mutisya Kioko writing on Kenya. In the ‘ungoverned spaces’ where state authority is lacking or ineffective, alternative authorities have risen. Focusing on Samburu and Turkana communities in the country’s marginalized northern territories, the Kenya Police Reserve (KPR)—a volunteer unit armed with weapons by the state—was established as a legal institution to assist

18 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

in the maintenance of law and order in the nation’s periphery. However, it evolved into an informal authority with ambivalent loyalties towards the communities and the state. Being unpaid, KPR members were found to be heavily engaged in the illegal trade of arms resulting in an increase of violent conflicts among ethnic groups they were meant to protect. Among the least known institutions of power are secret societies and their clandestine political operations. There is still much to be investigated in respect to the interconnectedness of state and extra-governmental institutions of power. One of those ominous groups operating with tremendous political authority and far-reaching connections into the highest ranks of politics was the Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret society of Afrikaners operating during the time of apartheid in South Africa and claiming legitimacy for the alleged good of the state and white supremacy. In her meticulous research, Julia Koch documents the story behind the story of a TV documentary about a Soweto hospital in 1979, at the height of apartheid. Its producer—even though having presented an excellent film on the appalling health conditions in a South African township—was fired within 24 hours for revealing the unpopular and ‘secret’ truth of day-­ to-­day life of the country’s African majority. Aiming at the relationship between visibility and legitimacy, this chapter highlights the immorality of lived apartheid. Due to close connections between Broederbond, National Party government, and the media—dating back to South Africa’s charismatic Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, himself a newspaper editor—the media played a decisive role in stabilizing apartheid. Interspersed with members of this secret society and the followers of its ideology, no media production was too small to escape their gaze in the effort of concealing the (il)legitimacy of power relations. Intolerable uncertainty and repression by the state may eventually result in mass migration fuelled by expectations of relief and more effective organization. Magnus Treiber and Mulu Getachew Abebe, writing on Eritrean refugees’ experiences in Ethiopian camps, are describing the troublesome journeys of people fleeing the intolerable—only to meet new and unknown structures of authority to be dealt with. According to their analysis, these structures may turn out not much different from what was left behind. International as well as national institutions are claiming legitimacy and represent power of many different kinds and sources, leaving the individual to learn about what it means to survive in an unknown world of authorities: submit or evade, know whom to trust, or suffer the often dire consequences. In an environment of mistrust, fraud and

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

19

violence, disorientation and half-knowledge, unknown challenges of individuality but also of sociality and political consciousness evolve. It is both disturbing and reassuring to identify trustworthy authorities prevailing under the most adverse circumstances. Casting a broad and multidimensional view on the manifold manifestations of authority across vast cultural areas of Southern and Eastern Africa, the current volume purposefully avoids imposing an overarching scholarly narrative that could generate a concise, conclusive analysis within an inherently self-evident, neatly circumscribed geographical unit. In various respects, the regional and theoretical localizations of the individual contributions mirror the current state of anthropological research on the general issue of this volume. Ethnographically, they are focusing on ten nation-­ states of Eastern and Southern Africa—Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, DR Congo, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, South Africa, and Namibia. Some regions are more strongly represented than others, a fact that is owed to personal research preferences on the one hand—but equally so to research contexts of particular projects, national research policies, and international networks. It should also be kept in mind that (post) colonial relations, political configurations, and the overall situation of academic facilities as framing conditions do have an impact on the outline of research—even though they may not be decisive in absolute terms. Of a total of fourteen ethnographic papers compiled in this volume, four are dealing with Namibia—all focusing on questions of political representation and power relations, with two of them presented by German anthropologists. This is certainly no coincidence, given the strong historical ties between Namibia and Germany. Conversely, the three contributions on Ethiopia, all of which focus on rejecting existing state authorities or searching for alternative ones in opposition, convey a vivid picture of current conflicts but may also be a manifestation of a new political awareness within the country. Rather than adhering to definitional guidelines or interpretational preferences stipulated by the editors, the twenty-four authors of this volume develop their own methodological as well as theoretical foundations representing their specific research outlines. This analytical pluralism allows for a maximum of perspectives, conceptually diverse frames of reference, and a wide array of analytical models and specific aspects to be prioritized—such as competing values, hybrid forms of legitimacy, mediated authority, and contested sources of power. By delineating a broad spectrum of possible avenues for interpretation that engage with and grasp

20 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

concepts of authority, legitimacy, and power, the final collection of contributions follows our intention of capturing emic perceptions and the processes of their (re)construction in the course of historical, political, and cultural conditions. Epistemologically, the open frame of analysis we apply facilitates the challenging of (inherently Western) definitional hegemonies, allows for deeper insights in local contexts, and leads us to address our research questions about the groundwork processes of authority-­ building, legitimacy-claiming, and power-holding. All our contributions are offering their own answers to a central question: what can we learn about ‘authority’ in African contexts?

6   Alternative Authorities? Looking into the rich ethnographic data of this book’s contributions, we understand authority as a volatile and contested category which, both analytically and empirically, is anything but clear and far from self-evident. Cherished assumptions of the interconnectedness of power, legitimacy, and authority will have to be reviewed if we want to understand the strategies by which conflicting perspectives on authority are negotiated in African contexts and, by implication, further afield. There is certainly no easy way of grasping the salient concepts, hidden implications, and open or concealed forms of resistance to power. Authority may be vested in the hands of formal powerholders and in completely different settings side by side. The notion of ‘legitimate’ power transferred to single persons and/ or institutions by democratic procedures turns out to be only one of several mechanisms by which authority may be claimed or allocated. Its sources may well lie beyond human control and still be considered acceptable—if not preferred to other forms of legitimization. Political actors can never be too sure of their legally exercised power, nor will traditions serve as viable options to opposition. Rather than conceptualizing power and authority in dichotic terms, we identify multiple and pluralized notions of alternative authorities—operating not as opposing phenomena but as parallel mechanisms of power in a principally contingent framework of social order. To analytically capture these complex entanglements and open-ended questions may be quite a challenge to anthropologists since the theoretical models we work with are usually only allowing for a particular focus of interest at a time, each taking us one step further as this volume clearly demonstrates: be it the theoretical approaches of Weber, Foucault,

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

21

Bourdieu, or Williams on power and legitimacy, or theories on the post-­ colony, more specifically on traditional and neotraditional authorities. They do allow us to answer our introductory questions as to the merging (or drifting apart) of power and authority, the actors engaged in the process, the resources activated, the institutions involved, the underlying culture-specific concepts, and the different ways of maintaining or opposing power. In application of anthropology’s actor-centred perspective, the contributions address additional issues which are often neglected in scientific analyses: the modelling of authority and its transformative processes such as local ideas of ‘participatory government’, the expectations placed in a person accorded authority in regard to his or her personality, appropriate behaviour and loyalty, as well as diverse forms of legitimacy claiming paralleling legal institutions and positions. Rather than looking for the one and only explanation, talking about alternative authorities requires us to think in alternatives as an analytical model. This will keep us busy. This volume addresses the different strategies by which conflicting perspectives on authority are navigated in African settings. It explores the variety of ways in which authority is defined and contested, particularly with the expansion of global institutions and the rapid spread of universalizing forms of knowledge. Generating heterogeneous and specific modernities across different settings, these globalized developments urge questions concerning which institution, what kind of knowledge, or whose expertise is accepted as authoritative—questions indicating complex processes of negotiation that highlight the specificities and pluralities in contemporary societies. The inherent contradictions between what is perceived as local vis-à-vis global forms of knowledge, between different discourses vying for social acceptance and legitimacy, constitutes an open-ended process that questions traditions, creates spaces, transforms hierarchies, and re-prioritizes values. In so doing, this collection means to foster critical debate on different modes of maintaining (and challenging) social structures or institutions that allocate decision-making privileges to persons or groups of people based on specific criteria, including claims of democratic legitimacy, moral normativity, or economic viability. But beyond anthropologists’ scientific discourses that might be triggered or encouraged by this book, what we learn is that individuals, groups of persons, and societies are neither incapable nor unwilling to take matters into their own hands. Authorities may be respected or feared, supported or bypassed, contested or violently rejected—the exercise of power and authority always requires some kind of social and/or cosmological

22 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

legitimization. We need to understand the ongoing social processes of recognizing, negotiating, evaluating, and challenging the legitimacy of authoritative positions, the contestations and competitions regarding whose interpretation of reality dominates all others. To put it simply: what we have to acknowledge is the fact that many people in Africa—and elsewhere—are no longer easily satisfied with globally established forms of authority and power. There is more than one answer to the question why this is so: whether it is the legacy of their historical heritage or due to processes of postcolonial awareness or today’s fast-spreading (and, partially and/or allegedly, fake) news in an ever-more globalized world that let people believe what they must or should not accept, what can be supported or ought to be rejected. They seek for alternative kinds of authorities, construct their own, call upon external powers—or may feel forced to leave their countries of origin, often to find similar conditions elsewhere. In one location after another, powerholders are not necessarily holders of authority, and they may feel compelled to maintain their power by a vast playbook of stratagems. This means they have to master the game of ‘challenging authorities’.

References Adams, Richard N. (1977). Power in Human Societies: A Synthesis. In: Fogelson, Raymond D. / Adams, Richard N. (Eds.), The Anthropology of Power: Ethnographic Studies from Asia, Oceania, and the New World. New York, NY: Academic Press, pp. 387–410. Adejumbi, Said (Ed.). (2018). Voice and Power in Africa’s Democracy: Institutions, Participation and Accountability. London: Routledge. Anderson, Benedict (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Arendt, Hannah (1970). On Violence. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World. Arendt, Hannah (1961). Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. London: Faber and Faber. Asad, Talal (1970). The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe. New York, NY: Praeger. Barrett, Stanley R. (2002). Culture Meets Power. Westport, CN: Praeger. Beidelman, Thomas O. (1971). Nuer Priests and Prophets: Charisma, Authority, and Power among the Nuer. In: Thomas O. Beidelman (Ed.), The Translation of Culture: Essays to E. E. Evans-Pritchard. London: Tavistock, pp. 375–415. Berger, Peter L. / Luckmann, Thomas (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Books.

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

23

Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bloch, Maurice (1974). Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority? In: Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 15 (1), pp. 54–81. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). The Forms of Capital. In: Richardson, John G. (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York, NY: Greenwood Press, pp. 241–258. Buur, Lars / Kyed, Helene Maria (Eds.). (2007). State Recognition and Democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Dawn for Traditional Authorities? New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Clifford, James (1983). On Ethnographic Authority. In: Representations, 2 (1983), pp. 118–146. Comaroff, Jean / Comaroff, John L. (Eds.). (2006). Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comte, Auguste (1853). The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (2 Volumes). London: John Chapman Doctorow, Osher (1963). Group Structure and Authority. In: American Anthropologist, 65 (2), pp. 312–322. Durkheim, Emile (1974). Sociology and Philosophy. (First published in 1906) New York, NY: Free Press. Ember, Melvin (1962). Political Authority and the Structure of Kinship in Aboriginal Samoa. In: American Anthropologist, 64 (5), 964–971. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland / Nielsen, Finn Sievert (2013). A History of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Fanon, Frantz (2004). The Wretched of the Earth. (First published in 1961) New York, NY: Grove Press. Ferguson, James (1994). The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fortes, Meyer / Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. (Eds.). (1940). African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (First published in 1975) New York, NY: Random House. Frazer, James G. (1890). The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. (2 Volumes.) New York, NY: Macmillan & Co. Freeman, Derek (1964). Some Observations on Kinship and Political Authority in Samoa. In: American Anthropologist, 66 (3), pp. 553–568. Fried, Morton (1967). The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

24 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

Furedi, Frank (2013). Authority: A Sociological History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gledhill, John (2000). Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. New York, NY: Pluto Press. Graeber, David / Sahlins, Marshall (2017). On Kings. Chicago, IL: Hau Books. Graeber, David (2011). Debt: The First 5000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, Stuart (1992). The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Herbst, Jeffrey (2014). States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric / Ranger, Terence O. (Eds.). (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iliffe, John (1979). A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahn, Joel (2001). Anthropology and Modernity. In: Current Anthropology, 42 (5), pp. 651–680. Koechlin, Lucy / Förster, Till (Eds.). (2015). The Politics of Governance: Actors and Articulations in Africa and Beyond. New York, NY: Routledge. Kuipers, Joel (2013). Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective. In: Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, pp. 399–413. Kurtz, Donald V. (2001). Political Anthropology: Paradigms and Power. Boulder, CO: Westview. Lagalisse, Erica (2019). Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. (First published in 1991) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lindholm, Charles (1986). Kinship Structure and Political Authority: The Middle East and Central Asia. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28 (2), pp. 334–355. Lukes, Steven (1974). Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan. Mbembe, Achille (2001). On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McCurdy, David W. / Shandy, Dianna / Spradley, James (2016). Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology. Boston, MA: Pearson. Middleton, John (1960). Lugbara Religion: Ritual and Authority among an East African People. London: Oxford University Press. Miller, Walter B. (1955). Two Concepts of Authority. In: American Anthropologist, 57 (2), pp. 271–289.

  INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING AUTHORITY 

25

Morgan, Lewis H. (1877). Ancient Society: or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Chicago, IL: C.H. Kerr. Muckle, Robert J. / Tubelle de González, Laura (2016). Through the Lens of Anthropology: An Introduction to Human Evolution and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nader, Laura (2015). What the Rest Think of the West: Since 600 AD. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nencel, Loraine / Pels, Peter (Eds.). (1991). Constructing Knowledge: Authority and Critique in Social Science. London: Sage. Oomen, Barbara (2005). Chiefs in South Africa: Law, Power & Culture in the Post-Apartheid Era. New York, NY: Palgrave. Parsons, Talcott (1966). Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Rabo, Annika (2020). Conspiracy Theory as Occult Cosmology in Anthropology. In: Butter, Michael / Knight, Peter (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 81–93. Ranger, Terence O. (1983). The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa. In: Hobsbawm, Eric / Ranger, Terence O. (Eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: University Press, pp. 211–262. Richards, Audrey I. (1964). Authority Patterns in Traditional Buganda. In: Fallers, Lloyd A. (Ed.), The King’s Men: Leadership and Status in Buganda on the Eve of Independence. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 256–293. Said, Edward W. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Random House. Sangren, P.  Steven (1988). Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography: ‘Postmodernism’ and the Social Reproduction of Texts. In: Current Anthropology, 29 (3), pp. 405–435. Sennett, Richard (1980). Authority. London: Faber and Faber. Skalník, Peter (1999). Authority versus Power: A View from Social Anthropology. In: Cheater, Angela (Ed.), The Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures. London: Routledge, pp. 163–174. Skalník, Peter (1996). Authority versus Power: Democracy in Africa Must Include Original African Institutions. In: Journal of Legal Pluralism, 28 (37–38), pp. 109–121. Stroeken, Koen (2010). Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Tylor, Edward B. (1871). Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (2 Volumes). London: J. Murray. Ubink, Janine (2008): Traditional Authorities in Africa: Resurgence in an Era of Democratisation. Leiden: Leiden University Press.

26 

A. S. STEINFORTH AND S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

Vail, Leroy (Ed.). (1989). The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Vaughan, Chris (2010). Reinventing the Wheel? Local Government and Neo-­ Traditional Authority in Late-Colonial Northern Sudan. In: International Journal of African Historical Studies, 43 (2), pp. 255–278. Vaughan, Olufemi (Ed.). (2005). Tradition and Politics: Indigenous Political Structures in Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. von Kessel, Ineke / Oomen, Barbara (1997). One Chief, One Vote: The Revival of Traditional Authorities in Post-Apartheid South Africa. In: African Affairs, 96 (385), pp. 561–585. Weber, Max (1930). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (First published in 1904–1906) London: G. Allen & Unwin. Weber, Max (1922). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. J.C.B. Mohr: Tübingen. West, Harry G. / Sanders, Todd (Eds.). (2003). Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. West, Harry G. / Kloeck-Jenson, Scott (1999). Betwixt and Between: ‘Traditional Authority’ and Democratic Decentralization in Post-War Mozambique. In: African Affairs, 98 (393), pp. 455–484. West, Harry G. (1998). ‘This Neighbor is Not My Uncle!’: Changing Relations of Power and Authority on the Mueda Plateau. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 24 (1), 141–160. Williams, J.  Michael (2010). Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Willis, Justin (2001). ‘Beer Used to Belong to Older Men’: Drink and Authority among the Nyakyusa of Tanzania. In: Africa, 71 (3), pp. 373–390. Wolf, Eric R. (1990). Facing Power – Old Insights, New Questions. In: American Anthropologist, N.S., 92 (3), pp. 586–596.

PART I

Power and the (Post)Colonial State

Whose State? Whose Nation? Representations of the History of the Arab Slave Trade and Nation-Building in Tanzania Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Anastasia A. Banshchikova, and Oxana V. Ivanchenko

1   Introduction: History and Nation-Building in Postcolonial States Postcolonial societies are a unique phenomenon in world history. Their emergence in the mid-twentieth century did not result from centuries-old internal social processes but was directly determined by the formation and short-lived (by historical standards) existence and disintegration of the European colonial empires. The colonial borders reflected primarily the balance of forces between the metropolitan powers but not the preceding course of local political, social, economic, and cultural history. With rare exceptions, many different peoples, often those of different levels of sociocultural complexity that had never formed regional political and economic systems and sometimes had not even known about each other or had been historical enemies, were forcibly united within colonies.

D. M. Bondarenko (*) • A. A. Banshchikova • O. V. Ivanchenko Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_2

29

30 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

The postcolonial states have inherited the artificial complexity of societal composition and economic and cultural heterogeneity alongside with the former colonial borders. Postcolonial states are a legacy of colonialism in the sense that when the colonizers were leaving, the world was already ‘global’. The sovereign nation-state is a form of political organization that today allows a country to be a full subject of international law. It is so because contemporary international law is based on the recognition of the nation-state as the basic unit of international relations and world politics. Thus, postcolonial countries simply had no alternative to declaring themselves sovereign nation-states. In the postcolonial situation, the problems born by colonialism have acquired new dimensions, connected, in particular, with the necessity to substitute colonial states with sovereign nation-states. Respectively, the formation of national unity when national identity would be more important for the citizens than belonging to any smaller group (regional, ethnic, religious, etc.) has become an important task. According to the figurative expression of the first President of Tanzania, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, you cannot enter the twenty-first century by the basi la makabila, or ‘tribalism vehicle’, that is, it is pointless to use old identities while moving into the future (Mtavangu 2017, p. 82). In Europe, it took centuries for the realization of internal prerequisites for the maturing of the nation as a form of cultural unity in the civil society and of the nation-state as the form of its political organization. As a result, in nation-states, the cultural and political borders were brought into conformity (Gellner 1983), while due to the formation of the civil society, a gap between the society and the state was bridged (Breuilly 1993). In most postcolonial states, it became necessary to form civil societies, nation-states, and national cultures as fast as possible on the basis of in many ways random and heterogeneous conglomerates of cultures and societies. As a consequence of their specific way of formation and development in the colonial time, the initially leading role of the state, not society, has become a significant feature of nation-building in postcolonial countries. As the civil society did not form in African and Asian countries in the colonial period, societies remained fragmented along tribal, ethnic, regional, religious, and other lines that determined the identities of most of their members, only the state could take on the integrating role. Thus, nation-­ building in postcolonial countries was initiated and directed by an external to the society force that stood over it. This determines not only the specific process but also current results of postcolonial nation-building. In

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

31

particular, it explains why there remains a significant gap between society and the state, why the impact of the former on the latter is still relatively weak. The postcolonial state has turned out much more stable and capable of adapting to changes at the global, regional, and national levels than it used to be supposed by scholars not so long ago (see Jakwa 2017; Nugent 2011; Young 2012). Without internal preconditions for formation in the present borders and having an originally modern European political system, the postcolonial countries more and more often can remain viable only with a big (compared to the liberal West) role of the state, including its “constructivist” role in nation-building. In particular, in the postcolonial situation, an appeal to the historical past is important for identity construction, and the state has especially great opportunities for manipulating the citizens’ historical memory for the purpose of achieving national unity.

2   The Research: Questions, Methods, Scope, and Significance The main research questions of this chapter are as follows: How is the Arab slave trade in East Africa and the Indian Ocean kept in the popular cultural memory of African Tanzanians who form the overwhelming majority of the country’s population? Are there any significant differences in this memory between various groups of the population? How does the Tanzanian state use and abuse the real history of the Arab slave trade and the memory of it in the process of nation-building? When and how does popular memory resist the pressure of the official (state-promoted) interpretation of the slave trade or experience changes under it? What do the tensions between different popular and official interpretations of the Arab slave trade say about the nature and results of the nation-building process in the postcolonial state of the United Republic of Tanzania? The chapter is based on the results of research conducted by the authors in Tanzania in 2018–2019 in the context of previous fieldwork on different aspects of state-building in that country done by them since the early 2000s. The 2018 field research was carried out in three cities of Tanzania, which are of considerable interest in terms of studying the historical memory of the slave trade—Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo (and the adjacent Kaole village), and Zanzibar (including Nungwi village). Structured and non-­ structured interviews, most in-depth, were conducted both in English and

32 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Swahili. All the interviews were done with African Tanzanians of both sexes, different ages, religions, and social statuses. The 2019 field research was conducted in Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo, Tanga, and Pangani and focused more on the geography of the slave trade and the attitudes towards people of slave origin. Besides, during both seasons, school history textbooks, museum expositions, and public memorials were analysed. The research was focused on the historical memory of the Arab slave trade in the light of nation-building in the country, particularly, on the problem of inclusion in and/or exclusion from the Tanzanian nation of this non-African minority by the African majority. While there are works on the Arabs’ past and present in Tanzania (e.g. Bennett 1978; Korotayev and Khaltourina 2008; Lodhi 1986; Prins 1967) and on the East African slave trade (e.g. Austen 1988; Collins 2006; Cooper 1977; Vernet 2009; Zimba et  al. 2005), the present-day perception of Arabs by African Tanzanians (Tanzanian citizens of African origin) in the context of the memory of the slave trade is definitely understudied. Its study has begun very recently and has been limited so far to analyses of places of memory, particularly with regard to heritage protection and tourism (Fabian 2013; Lindström 2019; Rhodes 2018; Wynne-Jones 2011). Arabs are the oldest non-local community in the country that has been mixing with the African Tanzanian majority for a long time, very few of whom in the present generations are fluent in Arabic (Korotayev and Khaltourina 2008). They remain an important part of Tanzanian society as their impact on the country’s economy and culture is much more significant than their relatively small proportion of its population. For a better understanding of African Tanzanians’ attitudes to Arabs, it is necessary to give a brief overview of their history in the country with emphasis on their involvement in the slave trade (although the history and role of Arabs in East Africa can by no means be reduced to it). First of all, however, it is necessary to clarify what collective identity is named ‘Arabs’ in East Africa nowadays. In the conception of African Tanzanians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they and minorities of non-African descents (Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Europeans) are separate cultural communities within the political community of Tanzanian citizens (Ivanchenko 2013, pp. 53–54). Even the term ‘Tanzanians’ is widely used in a specific non-political sense covering only African Tanzanians. This self-identification system was already shaped in the middle of the twentieth century. Citizens of the country believe that Tanzania is inhabited by ‘Tanzanians’ (which notion in their colloquial speech is not equal to ‘all

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

33

the citizens of Tanzania’) and several other groups living in the country (whether with Tanzanian citizenship or not), primarily ‘Arabs’ and ‘Indians’. For example, our respondents systematically used the word ‘Tanzanians’ as opposed to the ‘Arabs’ of Tanzania, regardless of whether those ‘Arabs’ were citizens of the state or not, and of how long their ancestors lived on its territory. The term ‘Tanzanians’ is synonymous for them with Africans of Tanzania (African Tanzanians). The ‘Arab’ citizens of the country belong to the ‘political nation’ of Tanzania, but not to the ethnic community of ‘Tanzanians’. The distinction between ‘Tanzanians’ and ‘Arabs’ in this sense is made primarily by external, racial-and-­ anthropological characteristics, linked to representations of historical realities: ‘Arabs’ means the descendants of the real ethnic Arabs maintaining the phenotype of their ancestors who settled on the territory of Tanzania over the past several centuries (primarily due to the activity and power of the Omani Sultanate), as well as Arabs who arrived in Tanzania in recent decades. The origin of the distant ancestors as such does not play a fundamental role in this juxtaposition of ‘Tanzanians’ and ‘Arabs’: the so-called Shirazi are included in the community of ‘Tanzanians’, although their families were formed (or are thought and assumed to have been formed) by immigrants from Persia many centuries ago, but this does not prevent Shirazi from being firmly regarded as part of the ‘Tanzanians’, and not ‘Arabs’, since Shirazi have the same phenotype as other ‘Tanzanians’. The differentiation between ‘Tanzanians’ and ‘Arabs’ reflects neither religious differences (many ‘Tanzanians’ are Muslims, like most ‘Arabs’), nor differences in language (the majority of ‘Arabs’ speak Swahili and do not speak Arabic). This only affects the variable allocation of different groups within the category of ‘Arabs’—according to the ‘degree of Swahilization’ and the length of time their families live in the country (cf. Glassman 1995, p. 33; Korotayev and Khaltourina 2008, p. 13)—not in appearance (e.g., traditional Arab clothing is worn by many ‘Tanzanian’ Muslims, but not by all ‘Arabs’). The category of ‘Arabs’ is opposed to the category of ‘Tanzanians’ (as one of descendants of aliens who remain ethnically alien to some indigenous people) primarily in accordance with physical appearance in conjunction with opinions about a connection of this appearance with a specific place of one’s ancestors in the history of Tanzania. Thus, this contrast has an ideological connotation, which is associated in many aspects not with any actually observed differences between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Tanzanians’, but with common views of the country’s history and the place of the ancestors of certain families in it. Without such perceptions,

34 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

the difference in appearance as such hardly could result in the perception of those Arabs who have been living in the country for many generations and have completely switched to the Swahili language, as a part of ‘Arabs’ and not ‘Tanzanians’.

3   Arabs and Their Involvement in the Slave Trade in East Africa: A Brief Overview Pre-Islamic Arab sites on the territory of modern Tanzania were temporary trading posts. A significant influx of Arabs to the East African coast occurred after the emergence of Islam in the seventh century, especially from the tenth century onwards. The spread of Islam, the world religion that perceives trade most positively, contributed to the emergence of permanent urban trade communities which later became centres of development of the Swahili civilization—a synthesis of an original local culture with numerous and significant Arab cultural elements. By the fourteenth century, there were about 30 independent coastal Swahili city-states ruled by Arab Muslim dynasties or by Shirazi—Islamized Africans. Arabs formed a significant part of those cities’ population (Allen 1993; Hurreiz 1985). Black slaves were among the goods Arab traders exported from East Africa in the Middle Ages, though in rather modest numbers (Alexander 2001; Campbell 2016; Chittick 1970, p. 103). In the early modern time, however, the slave trade in East Africa was controlled by the Portuguese and conducted mainly in the inland areas of the Zambezi River Basin (Pearson 1998; Strandes 1961; Vernet 2009). By that time, the Portuguese had established their rule over Zanzibar, a number of settlements along the coastline of East Africa, and in Oman in Arabia. In the middle and second half of the seventeenth century, Oman was freed from Portuguese rule and conquered Zanzibar and other Portuguese East African possessions north of Mozambique. This led to the commercial and political dominance of the Omani in the region. Unguja Island (i.e. Zanzibar) became an important stronghold of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, and Omani Arabs established themselves as the dominant community on the island. In 1840, Sultan Seyyid Said moved the capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, and after his death in 1856, the state was divided. Unguja and its tributary territories in East Africa formed the Zanzibar Sultanate under the authority of one branch of Seyyid Said’s

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

35

descendants, and the Omani Sultanate was under the reign of another branch. The Zanzibar Arab elite and traders became deeply involved in the constantly growing slave trade and slaveholding and became the main force in the region in this regard. The slave trade began to expand in the eighteenth century due to the development of the sugar cane colonial plantation economy in the French Mascarene Islands of Mauritius (Île-de-France) and Reunion (Bourbon). The majority of slaves came from Mozambique, but about a quarter was provided by the Swahili city of Kilwa. The British seized Mauritius and, in 1821, restricted the importation of slaves to the island. The following year, a treaty (the Moresby Treaty) was concluded with the Sultan of Muscat prohibiting Omanis to bring slaves to British possessions in India and the Indian Ocean and selling slaves to Christians of any nationality. Yet Bourbon, still belonging to the French, continued for a while to receive slaves from Swahili ports (Gerbeau 1979; Klein 2005, p. 1384; Ogot 1979, p. 177). The main reason for the dramatic growth of the slave trade in the nineteenth century was not the significant profit gained from the sale of slaves to countries of consignment, but the transformation of the economy of the region into a plantation slave economy. In the first half of the nineteenth century, extensive plantations of cloves, coconuts, and grains were established on Zanzibar and the neighbouring island of Pemba, requiring even more labour than the plantations of the Mascarene Islands. Their owners were Hadhramaut and Omani Arabs and local Swahili businesspeople from the mainland. During the reign of Seyyid Said, the island became the largest slave market in East Africa. In addition to meeting the needs of Zanzibar and Pemba, slaves were taken to Arabia, the countries of the Persian Gulf, India, Reunion, Madagascar, the Comoros, Seychelles, and the New World (Alpers 2005, p. 7; Austen 1988, p. 21; Collins 2006, p.  339; Gerbeau 1979, p.  199; Hooper and Eltis 2013; Ogot 1979, pp.  177–178; Sheriff 2005). To capture slaves, Arabs travelled in many directions deep into the continent, reaching the territory of the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo (Wynne-Jones 2011, p. 317). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the main export of slaves was via the port of Kilwa, and in 1866, it supplied 95% of slaves for Zanzibar plantations (Cooper 1977, pp.  115–122; Ogot 1979, p.  178; Sheriff 1987, p. 226). Subsequently, the centre of the slave trade shifted to the north, and the coastal stripe opposite the Zanzibar archipelago from Pangani to

36 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Bagamoyo became its important zone (Collins 2006, p.  339; Croucher 2015, p. 45; Kake 1979, p. 167). Since the time of Sultan Seyyid Said, Arabs on the Swahili coast have been associated with the slave trade and perceived as slave traders. This view was supported by British abolitionists and fixed in the colonial education system (Rhodes 2018), although many African chiefs and other administrators were also involved in the slave trade, mainly by selling people for weapons. The transfer of the capital from Muscat to Zanzibar resulted in the most noticeable influx of Arab migrants. Most Omani noble families moved to the island, bringing their traditions and customs. Whereas before, Arabs came mainly for trading, now the Omani elite became engaged in land development and the establishment of plantations, initially holding a higher status than the indigenous population and monopolizing access to governance (Mbogoni 2012, p. 195). British efforts to stop slave exports—which included the Moresby Treaty of 1822 and the Hammerton Treaty of 1845, prohibiting the slave trade south of Cabo Delgado and to the north of Brava, respectively— paradoxically enhanced the existing state. In 1873, under pressure from the British, Sultan Seyyid Bargash declared the slave trade illegal and closed the slave market in Zanzibar (see Figs. 1 and 2 for contemporary Tanzanian Museum representations of the slave trade). However, slave owning was abolished on the island only in 1897 and in Tanganyika in 1922. In 1890, the British signed a protectorate treaty with the Sultan of Zanzibar, retaining the dominant positions for the Arabs (Longair 2016, pp. 18–23). The liberation organizations that appeared on Zanzibar in the mid-1950s focused mainly on overthrowing Arab oppression rather than the British protectorate. In 1957, Africans and Shirazi created the Afro-­ Shirazi Party (ASP) in opposition to the National Party of Zanzibar that united mainly the Arabs. A series of elections (January and June 1961, July 1963) resulted in the ASP’s failure to gain a majority of seats in parliament (Glassman 2011; Mbogoni 2012, pp. 189–201). The Zanzibar Sultanate gained independence on December 10, 1963, but as early as January 12, 1964, the ASP, with considerable support from Tanganyika, staged a coup d’état. The sultan was dethroned, and Zanzibar integrated with Tanganyika into a new state—the United Republic of Tanzania—in the same year. Immediately after the revolution, massacres began, and from 5000 to 10,000 Zanzibari Arabs were murdered while many others hastily fled (Petterson 2002). The new highest governing body, the Revolutionary Council of Zanzibar, repeatedly raised the issue

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

37

Fig. 1  Exposition on slavery and the slave trade in the National Museum, Dar es Salaam. (Photo by Oxana V. Ivanchenko)

of the Arabs’ citizenship and their possible deportation to their homeland. The ‘emotional force’ of these bloody events was, among other things, the ‘historical association’ between Arab rule and slavery (Lofchie 1965, p. 209). Thus, mass violence during the revolution became a ‘revenge’ for the slave trade.

38 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Fig. 2  Representation of slaves carrying an elephant tusk. In the background, there is a social advertisement against attitude towards agricultural labour as slave labour (the same poster as in Karavan Serai, Fig.  3). National Museum, Dar es Salaam. (Photo by Anastasia A. Banshchikova)

The 2005 field research conducted by a team from the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by the present chapter’s first author, showed that the attitude towards ‘Arabs’ (see earlier what collective identity is marked so in Tanzania of late colonial and

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

39

post-­colonial decades) has improved significantly since the time of the Zanzibar revolution. Respondents noted that the Arabs had integrated well into the Tanzanian nation, especially praising the fact that they speak Swahili and marry Africans. Nevertheless, negative attitudes triggered by the tragic events of the past still linger (see Figs. 3 and 4). The evidence also showed that, as a rule, Arabs are eager to integrate into Tanzanian society more than Africans are willing to accept them as compatriots (Korotayev and Khaltourina 2008). New research by a team from the same Institute was to specify to what degree and in what ways the memory of the slave trade influences African Tanzanians’ attitudes towards Tanzanian Arabs: Whether they prevent the former from treating the latter as compatriots and include them in the Tanzanian nation or not.

4   Field Evidence About the Attitudes of African Tanzanians to Tanzanian Arabs The interviewees’ opinions on the contemporary relations between Africans and Arabs in Tanzania split into almost equal parts of those convinced that they are completely good (39 respondents out of 76 in 2018 field research) and those who believe that there are tensions, particularly because of the slave trade in the past (37 people). For analytical purposes, we have divided the interviews into three groups. In the ‘red’ group are those who openly talked about African Tanzanians’ hatred and bad attitudes towards Arabs. The ‘yellow’ group includes those who considered the situation as generally normal but indicated the presence of ‘some people’ who treat Arabs badly, or ‘some tensions’. In fact, people from the ‘yellow’ group gave opinions close to those expressed by people from the ‘red’ group. In the ‘green’ group are those who believe there are no problems in African Tanzanian-Arab relations. Of course, this division is rather conventional and sometimes even judgmental because in most cases, we dealt with in-depth interviews, not questionnaires. Thus, the answers cannot be interpreted univocally. We will cite several interviewees from all three groups to give an explicit understanding of the situation.

40 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Fig. 3  Social advertisement against discrimination of descendants of slaves, Karavan Serai, Bagamoyo. (Photo by Anastasia A. Banshchikova)

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

41

Fig. 4  Figure of a porter at the entrance to Karavan Serai, Bagamoyo. The compound served as a hostel for free upcountry porters and a resting place for caravan owners, but locals mostly consider it to be a place for accumulation of slaves or a slave market. (Photo by Oxana V. Ivanchenko)

42 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

4.1  The ‘Red’ Group A young man, tour guide in Bagamoyo: But for me, I don’t like Arabs, I hate Arab and Indian people, because of selling and buying African people.

A bar owner from Bagamoyo who grew up in Dar es Salaam: Me myself, I have negative feelings. […] Everyone was born to be free. You know, I was not born to be slave! Tell me, I have a feeling when I see a slave master. [meaning a person with a pronounced Arab identity.—authors].

A teacher at the Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy in Dar es Salaam: The history places Arabs as a second enemy […]. After Wazungu, Arabs [sic!] are on the second [place] […]. If the negativity persists, it’s only because of bad history.

4.2  The ‘Yellow’ Group A Bagamoyo resident: slavery in Tanzania, the way people remember, I don’t think there is hard feeling, really. People might find one or two persons here, saying ‘they enslaved us’, but let’s just talk really, because it’s been a long time now and Tanzania was not badly affected compared to the Congo.

A young female sociologist and Dar es Salaam resident: Currently, though the slave trade is already abolished, they took Africans in direct way, they took them into Arab countries, and some people are so into it, that they [Arabs] are not good people. […] First of all, because of slave trade and the activities that they are still doing—they take Africans, especially young ladies, to their country, and once they’re there, they take their passports, and other activities.

A high-ranking Bagamoyo police officer: In general, they [the relations between African Tanzanians and Arabs.— authors] were good, but there were tensions after the … terrorist attacks at the American embassy, perpetrated by the radicals. There was a negative attitude towards both Arabs and Islam as a whole.

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

43

4.3  The ‘Green’ Group Opinions of the ‘green’ group interviewees, who do not see problems in the relations between African Tanzanians and Arabs nowadays, are based on several main ideas. First, the past must remain in the past, there is no point in returning to it. Second, Arabs have been living in Tanzania for many generations side by side with Africans, marrying them, integrating into society, even defining themselves either as Swahili or some specific local tribes (although sometimes attire and language betray their roots). In Zanzibar, many people mention that Arab countries provide significant assistance to the island and can always be counted on in case of problems. A Dar es Salaam citizen and Moscow university alumnus: Generations change—history remains, but a new generation has no that feeling of hate of what happened before. […] So what happened before— even if it affected us—we are leaving it now. […] Past is the past. We are not there, you cannot hate or something, we care about our families and generation at the moment. They can’t do it again, it’s already done, it could never repeat again.

A young man, tour guide from Bagamoyo: [Today, the relations are] very good. Honestly, hundred percent good. Not deceive, I can say in general. Yeah, ‘cause I must have much experience about, ‘cause I was born here. No, I’ve never seen people hating people that much and even if some few people, just they think about it, but in more positive way, like ‘this thing they did was not good’, but [it] doesn’t mean like they hate people coming here, or Arabs, because they did slave trade, no. We have a lot of Arabs actually, friends, Arab friends, a lot. In Bagamoyo in other street, there, I have one of my friends, he is Arab, but he is my good friend. [In] my hometown [Mtwara.—authors] as well, a lot. And they are living in normal streets, they don’t have any protection area. So, this love thing, I think, is something existing, and you can feel [it] even yourself, no need even to ask. The people from Tanzania are very social.

A university educated man from Dar es Salaam: of course some people remember [the slave trade], those who have been affected. But we have a lot of changes [in society], and we have lots of relations with Arabs, for example, even the language we are using, Swahili, we have some common ways. Swahili and Arabic—very close, and even our

44 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

culture is much affected by Arabs. […] During the colonialism, because what we considered during colonialism... that one was bad—it was the Germans, Germans were colonizing this land after the Arabs. Interviewer: “So you mean that people remember more about the European colonialism than about the Arab slave trade?” “Yeah”. Interviewer: “And today, the relations between Tanzanians and Arabs are good”. “Of course, good”.

5   Conceptualization of Some African Tanzanians’ Negative Attitudes Towards Arabs Our analysis of field evidence has allowed to distinguish several important factors that influence African Tanzanians’ attitudes towards their Arab compatriots: (1) The level of education: although people of all education levels are present both in the ‘red/yellow’ and ‘green’ groups, there are many more people with primary education in the first, and college and university graduates in the second group. (2) The region of peoples’ origin: it tends to exert a degree of influence. All respondents originating from Dodoma (territory of the Gogo people and an important centre of the slave trade in mainland) were in the ‘red/yellow’ group. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of Zanzibarians (by origin and self-­identification) unsurprisingly turned out to be ‘green’. (3) Age matters: the older generation treats Arabs much less tolerantly. Sixteen people over 45 years old turned out to be in the ‘red/yellow’ group, and only seven in the ‘green’, while the groups are approximately equal. (4) Family history also proved to be an important factor determining African Tanzanians’ attitudes towards Arab Tanzanians. The majority of respondents with family trauma (those who had slaves among their ancestors) were in the ‘red/yellow’ group, as well as connoisseurs of the oral tradition about the slave trade, whose ancestors were not affected by the slave trade personally. (5) There is a great difference in the opinions expressed by adherents of different religions. In the ‘green’ group, there are both Christians

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

45

and Muslims, while the ‘red/yellow’ group is formed mainly by Christians. This is in accord with the words of the Christian respondents that Tanzanian Muslims in general are much more loyal to Arabs, because the latter introduced the culture of Islam—as one of the respondents put it, “we have been slaved by Arabs, but if we are copies of Arabs, we cannot hate ourselves”. Moreover, the very fact that Arabs brought Islam to Tanzania was positively emphasized by many interviewees regardless of their religious affiliation. To sum up: the worst attitude towards Arabs is mainly expressed by people with low education levels, originating from the regions most affected by the slave trade, of senior age, with family trauma, and of Christian faith. Two of these five factors—education level and religious affiliation—may not be directly attributed to the slave trade issue. The influence of education level on ethnic and religious tolerance is a general regularity (e.g. Bondarenko 2010). There are also some tensions between Christians and Muslims in Tanzania not directly related to the slave trade (e.g. Ndaluka 2012; Poncian 2015; Rukyaa 2007; Tetti 2014). However, the historical memories are used as an additional argument in the already existing contemporary tensions. The fact that people with family trauma or those originating from regions most affected by the slave trade are less tolerant is understandable and does not need any special explanation. We believe that people of older age often demonstrated negative feelings towards Arabs because they heard many more oral histories about, and memories of the slave trade time than younger people. Our interviewees clearly stated that evening gatherings of old people with children, during which they used to tell stories of their lives, are now withering and the entire oral tradition is fading away.

6   Perception of Geographical Destinations of the Arab Slave Trade and Ethnicity of Traders Young and middle-aged people demonstrated more friendly attitudes toward Arabs. An important factor that has led to it is that, for them, oral history, as a source of knowledge about the slave trade, has been substituted by manifestations of the Tanzanian state’s politics of memory.

46 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

As indicated earlier, East African slaves were taken to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, the Indian Ocean islands, and the New World. However, in the course of fieldwork, we got a completely different picture of the geography of the Arab slave trade from respondents. Not many of them could reliably answer the question about the final destinations, where slaves were shipped from Tanganyika and Zanzibar. The respondents either found it difficult to answer or said that the slaves were taken ‘to different countries’. The distribution of opinions was as follows: 36, Europe; 17, Arab/ Muslim countries; 16, the New World; 11, islands of the Indian Ocean (results of the 2018 and 2019 field seasons combined; one person could give several answers). Thus, many Tanzanians believe that slaves were taken to Europe. The percentage of these answers is the same as of all historically accurate answers aggregated. The logical consequence (or logical premise) of the belief that slaves were taken to Europe was the following concept, expressed by many Tanzanians: Europeans (or more specifically Germans and British) were the main beneficiaries of human trafficking. Arabs captured Africans, led them in caravans, and sold them on slave markets, but they were only intermediaries. “So Arab people, they bought people and sold them to the Germans. […] The Germans were waiting while the Arabs were doing the searching, finding people from different places when they get them, they take them straight to the German people”, a middle-aged Tanzanian said. “These are two peoples—European, Arab middlemen, the middlemen were Arabs, who were going around searching for the slaves and then … selling them to white people. But you don’t see white people doing that. They just came in selling. They just buying the people”, a young man said. People who have gained knowledge about the slave trade in their country from school textbooks mentioned Europe as the destination for slaves and proposed the concept of Arabs as ‘middlemen’ more often than seniors whose knowledge came mainly from oral histories and memories. (It should also be noted that these constructs are convenient for Muslims as they shift the blame from the Arabs who introduced Islam in the country.) Besides those who personally know the oral traditions better and have an interest in it (out of any specific social status connected with their transmission), those who immediately and without the slightest hesitation called the Arabs the main slave traders were the people with family trauma (Banshchikova and Ivanchenko 2019). However, even keepers of oral

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

47

tradition and people with family trauma sometimes added that Europeans had also been involved and slaves had been shipped to Europe. Here are the illustrative words of a young man from Bagamoyo who graduated from college with a degree in tourism: If Arabs needed slaves, what do they needed them for? What they say— “Yeah, perhaps we have been involved, all the books talking about Arabs only! … If the slaves … in Europe, in Asia, in somewhere, we don’t need to go collect them and sell them. We collected slaves, because whites need them, and we go sell to them. They need workers!”

7   One State, One Nation: Nyerere’s Legacy and the Arab Slave Trade in School Textbooks We have paid attention to the fact that many people from the ‘green’ group made general statements about the unity of the Tanzanian nation and friendly relations between all its groups: “Arabs are our people. These are our people” (a freelancer from Dar es Salaam with higher education); “We are together, no conflict until now” (a water seller in Bagamoyo); “So after that revolution, after union, all people of Tanzania were connected and be as one family. […] From my side … there is no doubt, there is no problem, all people live together in love and happiness” (a police officer in Bagamoyo). Moreover, respondents spoke of unity and good attitude as a result of Julius Nyerere’s policy. For example: “After Mwalimu Nyerere took this country, he made that everybody is equal… So far, we forget all the bad memories” (a young engineer). The scale of this heritage (e.g. Fouéré 2014), elucidated in the answers of our respondents, is impressive indeed. Many of them sincerely said they did not treat anyone badly, they perceived all people in Tanzania as fellow citizens and brothers, because that was what Mwalimu (i.e. ‘teacher’) Nyerere taught them. Indeed, Nyerere repeatedly stressed the necessity to move to a civic understanding of belonging to the Tanzanian community instead of one based on ethnicity and race. At the same time, nationalist politicians of the Julius Nyerere generation tried to present the slave trade as part of a longer process of external domination, which also included European colonialism (Giblin 2005). Even in modern school history textbooks, the history of the nineteenth-­ century Arab slave trade is paradoxically presented as part of the

48 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

twentieth-­ century colonial history of Tanzania. To date, the present authors have examined six textbooks as manifestations of the state’s politics of memory, the use and abuse of history by it. Four of them contain very similar, sometimes word for word, information: as a result of the industrial revolution and the development of capitalism in Europe, a need for the import of slaves, including from East Africa, increased to fill the gap in the labour force in European factories and plantations (see Ivanchenko 2019). Our respondents also mentioned the industrial revolution as the main reason for the development of the slave trade. The complete illogicality of such a concept (after all, the industrial revolution is, first and foremost, the process of substitution of manpower by machines) was not realized or did not confuse them. Such a contradictory representation of history in textbooks and respective opinions, expressed by the respondents, are not coincidental: they are a continuation of nation-building policy started by Julius Nyerere. Given that Arabs came to settle permanently at some points on the Tanganyika coast in the seventh century, they have been a part of the country’s population for a long time and thus occupied a certain position in society since the precolonial time. On the contrary, Europeans have never been a part of it, they were always represented as people of an alien culture who dominated politically in the colonial time and still try to dominate at least economically nowadays. So, colonialism is perceived negatively by most Tanzanians (Bondarenko 2014). For this reason, the Arab slave trade receives little attention compared to the prominence of European colonialism in modern textbooks. Europeans can be blamed for the sins that should have been attributed to the real offenders, or their descendants, modern Tanzanian Arabs (although many respondents repeatedly emphasized that they cannot be responsible for the actions of their ancestors). The second reason is the specific cultural status of Zanzibar, which was the capital of the Oman Sultanate and is still to some extent a part of the Arab world. From the point of view of national politics, it would be short-­ sighted to draw special attention to the island’s slave-trade past, although it was the largest slave market in the Indian Ocean, and even now there is a monumental complex of world importance associated with this sad page in history. It is the Stone Town of Zanzibar, which is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, where one can find memorials related to the slave trade, for example, the Anglican Cathedral erected to commemorate the struggle against the slave trade exactly on the site of the last slave market (Figs. 5 and 6).

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

49

Fig. 5  Anglican Cathedral built by Bishop Edward Steere (Universities’ Mission to Central Africa) on the former slave marketplace. Stone Town, Zanzibar. (Photo by Dmitri M. Bondarenko)

A very vivid and indicative example is the memorial tablet in Zanzibar on the house of the major slave trader, Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi, commonly known as Tippu Tip. The tablet says that he was the creator of a trading empire in Eastern Congo in the nineteenth century, which was destroyed after the beginning of Belgian colonization. This is absolutely the same approach of shifting the discourse from slavery to colonialism, as in the textbooks: firstly, it is omitted that Tippu Tip’s empire was actually a slave trading empire (although ivory trade also

50 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Fig. 6  Group sculpture commemorating the slave trade by the Swedish sculptor, Clara Sörnäs, on the former slave market premises, next to the Anglican Cathedral. Stone Town, Zanzibar. (Photo by Dmitri M. Bondarenko)

brought him profits), and secondly, Europeans are once again mentioned as scapegoats. Thus, for each individual in contemporary Tanzania, the history of the Arab slave trade lies between family trauma on the one hand, and tolerance and non-discrimination, imposed by the state, on the other. If a family was affected, if one’s ancestors became victims of slave traders, it is quite unlikely that this person will treat Arabs with tolerance. Such people are not very sensitive to state propaganda and attempt to smooth things over. Two ways of reproducing the historical memory of the nineteenth-­ century Arab slave trade largely oppose each other. The school system lays the blame on Europeans, promoting peaceful interethnic relations in the country, presenting the slave trade as an essential part of colonialism, and after that emphasizing the story of overcoming the colonial past. Conversely, the oral tradition censors nothing and tells the history of the

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

51

ancestors’ sufferings in its entirety, consequently awakening negative feelings in the descendants. Thus, keepers of the oral tradition with a low level of education, usually seniors, turn to be the most vulnerable category. They keep the family trauma and at the same time do not get a sufficient ‘textbook vaccination’, as well as a broader and less politically motivated view that life education provides. As a result, they become the least tolerant to the Arab-Tanzanian part of the country’s population.

8   Conclusion: Tanzanian Nation: Of Africans Only or All Citizens? Today, Tanzania is closer than most African countries to the formation of a nation as a community of co-citizens devoted to single basic values, sharing common culture and identity atop the local and particular, and for whom loyalty to the nation-state is primary with respect to regional, religious, ethnic, and other divisions (see Bondarenko 2016). The background for it is historical. On the one hand, most African states have not had an integrating autochthonous culture and language since precolonial time like the Swahili in Tanzania (despite the Arabs’ contribution and the fact that the language spread widely beyond the coastal stripe only in the nineteenth century when it became the language of instruction in missionary schools; see Gromova 2012, p. 256). For African Tanzanians, Swahili culture, including its language, is the root, source, and background of the Tanzanian nation, which hence does not owe its origin to colonialism. The vast majority of them, irrespective of ethnic origin and religion, are proud of belonging to this culture and consider it as African and pre-colonial, and hence not owing its emergence to colonialism, integrating people of different African ‘tribes’ in the Tanzanian nation atop (not instead of) their particular ethnic origins (Bondarenko 2010; Ivanchenko 2013). On the other hand, in pre-colonial times, there were no strong centralized polities in Tanzania’s mainland (Tanganyika) except the Shambaa (Shambala) kingdom (Feierman 1974; Winans 1962). In many other postcolonial states, such enclaves are centres of tribalistic nationalist regionalism or separatism and excite the neighbouring peoples’ historical memory of the former subjugation. In Tanzania, the potential resistance of relatively weak local chiefs was nipped effectively and without serious problems at the dawn of independence (Kavina 2020, p. 61). The importance of these facts in itself is multiplied by the state’s use of the Swahili

52 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

culture (Blommaert 2014, 2006; Kanana 2013) and manipulations with the citizens’ historical memory (Bondarenko 2014) as a means of nation-building. The historical past plays not only a significant but also a dual role in post-colonial nation-building. On the one hand, real historical facts and processes objectively promote or hinder nation-building and can have an effect on the directions of nations’ current development. On the other hand, collective historical (cultural) memory is not a ‘verbatim quote’, a ‘cast’ or a ‘photo’ of a people’s true history: constructed and reconstructed by various ideologists, passed through a filter of social consciousness again and again with each generation, the past is intricately refracted and even often distorted in it. However, the result of the historical memory’s operation is not necessarily lie or fib. Historical memory can be unrelated to the facts, but the images of the past, cultural myths generated by the historical memory, may prove reliable in the way they reflect the general essence of specific events and whole periods. These images and myths can appear convincing to people, and hence influence their worldview and social behaviour. It is not by chance that peoples’ historical memory was an ideological battlefield on which colonialists and activists of liberation movements struggled (see e.g. Werbner 1998). In the post-colonial situation, an appeal to the historical past is no less important for identity construction (e.g. Jewsiewicki 2010; Lentz 2006). We have pointed out in the introduction to this chapter that, as nation-building in postcolonial countries was initiated and directed by the state, the latter has especially great opportunities for manipulating the citizens’ historical memory to achieve its goals, including the formation of national unity. Our analysis of the data confirms that manipulation with and actual falsification of the historical facts regarding the Arab slave trade as a part of policy aimed at establishing national unity by the Tanzanian state is a good example of this. The analysis provided in this chapter can be quite important for current theoretical debates on authority and power in the postcolonial world and far beyond, historically and geographically. In particular, our analysis can become a contribution to the long-lasting discussion of the sources of power in societies. These sources manifest themselves in different forms but remain essentially the same throughout history (Earle 1997; Kurtz 2001; Mann 1986–2012). Cultural, or historical, memory feeds ideology as a source of power, thus being one of power’s ideational resources. While this is a general rule observed in any society, at least complex, there may be some specificity in this rule’s manifestation in postcolonial societies,

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

53

particularly African. Once again, we should refer to the specific nature of the postcolonial society as such noted in the beginning of the present chapter. This will provide the analysis with a historical and cultural background, so important for political anthropology and often ignored by political science, particularly with respect to Africa (Graetz 2002; Horáková 2011, pp. 14–16). In postcolonial countries, “African development must build on independent nation-states whose economic base is pre-industrial agriculture” (Hart 2011, p. 13). From the cultural and political point of view, this means that postcolonial states have to fight for the essentially ‘modern’ national unity in the situation when separate cultures the postcolonial nations embrace and are to integrate, are so to say, not completely modern. They were significantly transformed in the colonial time but remained authentically African in many respects, that is, ‘traditional’ (Bondarenko 1997). Hence, the postcolonial states in Africa and elsewhere have to take the pathway of so-called neo-traditionalism (e.g. see Hassler 2012; Spear 2003). On this pathway, on the one hand, the postcolonial states are trying to re-actualize and materialize the memory of the ‘traditional’—precolonial—past in various forms, very often falsifying it (Mobutu’s Authenticité, or ‘Zairization’ is the best example; e.g. see Haskin 2005, pp. 44–48; Young and Turner 1985, pp. 326–362). On the other hand, the postcolonial states are seeking for integration of different ‘traditional’ institutions and making them serve the ‘modern’ national goals (e.g. by legalizing ‘traditional chiefs’ in many countries, up to introducing the House of Chiefs as attachment to the national Parliament in Zambia; e.g. Baldwin 2016; Denisova 2020). At the same time, neo-­ traditionalism also manifests itself in different spheres, including the political, besides and beyond the states’ intentions, as the state is just exploiting the neo-traditionalist trends in the present-day African societies by directing and strengthening them, but does not generate the very phenomenon of neo-traditionalism which is an attribute of peoples’ cultures, particularly postcolonial African (Bondarenko and Butovskaya 2019, pp. 181–299; Ellis and ter Haar 2004, pp. 90–113; Horáková et al. 2011). The state uses and abuses the country’s history not only for the sake of consolidating the nation but also with the aim of firmer legitimizing itself in the citizens’ minds and souls. These two tasks are inseparable, and the Tanzanian case is not an exception to this rule. As the Tanzanian historian Alexander Kavina, writes, “While the adoption of a national language was an inevitable aspect for creating common national interest, the adoption of a clear political ideology as well as instituting a strong leadership became

54 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

an important tool through which legitimacy and nationhood could be attained” (Kavina 2020, p.  61). Actually, manipulations with history, including the history of the slave trade, are essentially legitimation practices: the state makes attempts to build up a nation, and the members of which would feel their indivisibility from the state in its present form. The present state, its ideology officially based on Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa theory (despite multiple deviations from it in practice since the late 1980s, see, e.g. Gathara 2011), and the nation are to become manifestations of the same substance, like Janus’ two faces, like a coin’s two sides. the nation, which in Ujamaa theory carries the national culture transmitted through Swahili, is in fact the state. Thus state ideology and National Culture become synonymous—an unjustified synonymy which has allowed the confusion between ‘objective’ Swahili culture (the historical culture of the coastal societies) and ‘subjective’ political Swahili culture (that of contemporary Tanzania). (Blommaert 2006, p. 18; emphasis in the original)

It should be noted at this point once again that the existence since pre-­ colonial time of the local Swahili culture and language that spread all over the country in the early colonial period makes the Tanzanian situation generally exceptional for sub-Saharan Africa, in most countries of which the postcolonial state has to try to integrate the populace into nations by strengthening rather weak cultural unity that began to form only within colonial borders and on the basis of languages of former colonial powers (Bondarenko 2016, 2014; Bondarenko et al. 2013). As Amy Niang writes: postcolonial states are built on morally and ethically uncertain grounds. […] It was never […] clear what the postcolonial state was meant to be or what goods and morality it was meant to create or cultivate for African peoples. […] the postcolonial state offered no moral resolution to the dilemma of ‘community’, social solidarity and legitimate authority. (Niang 2018, pp. 201–202)

As a rule, it is so. But the Tanzanian state has possibilities to apply to the precolonial history, including that of the slave trade, specially ‘adapted’ by it for achieving the dual purpose of nation-building and state legitimizing. In fact, the purpose of any authority is to persuade people that precisely this government is good for them (Beetham 1991; Cohen and Toland 1988; Kurtz 2001, 1994, pp. 53–65). And the Tanzanian way of achieving it, including the way the state uses and abuses history for both

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

55

nation-building and self-legitimizing, can be instructive and theoretically significant. The analysis of the African Tanzanians’ attitudes toward their Arab compatriots paradoxically testifies to the high degree of their national integration. While the Arabs’ position in contemporary Tanzanian society remains specific and in a sense ambivalent, the African Tanzanians can feel acutely cultural and historical unity within their community and hence tend to exclude their non-African by origin co-citizens from the Tanzanian nation as a culturally integrated community (Bondarenko et  al. 2013; Ivanchenko 2013). They believe that Tanzania is inhabited by ‘Tanzanians’ and several other groups living in the country (whether with Tanzanian citizenship or not), including ‘Arabs’. As pointed out earlier, the term ‘Tanzanians’ is synonymous for them with Tanzanian Africans. One of the respondents, being asked the direct question whether Tanzanian citizens of Arabian descent belong to the united nation of Tanzanians, answered charily: For most of the people that one is at policy level, at the government level. Like one nation, it should be feeling like that Arabs are also Tanzanians, etc. But mostly these Arabs, they are a business people, the money, and even when they’re living style is quite different from the other tribes. So you find that probably they have got in some streets. Meaning that’s the property of the Arabian. So, uh, yes. When you come to the political level it is fine, but on the daily life they’re not regarded as Tanzanians by the ordinary people. They say ‘ah, Mwarabu’, ‘this is an Arabian’. That’s what comes out.

Here it is clearly expressed that the ‘Arabs’ are recognized as co-citizens in the formal, political, or legal sense but not as people that belong to the cultural community of ‘Tanzanians’. The memory of the slave trade does not play a decisive part in it: contemporary cultural differences and ascribing Arabs the social position of traders, as well as the difference in physical appearance, are more important. Indeed, the association of Arabs with the exploitation of Africans in the past is present in the minds of quite a few African Tanzanians, but the Tanzanian government, generally successfully, tries to smooth over this negative attitude and promote Arab inclusion in the nation by African Tanzanians by corrupting historical facts and manipulating historical memory.

56 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Acknowledgements  The research is supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, grant # 20-09-00361 “Cultural Memory about 19th Century Arab Slave Trade and its Influence on Interethnic Relations in Modern-Day Tanzania.” The authors are grateful to Edward Alpers and Benigna Zimba for sending them a copy of the extremely valuable Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa, edited by them with A.F. Isaacman, which is unavailable from Russian libraries or on the Internet.

References Alexander, J. (2001). Islam, Archaeology and Slavery in Africa. In: World Archaeology, 33 (1), pp. 44–60. Allen, James de Vere (1993). Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and the Shungwaya Phenomenon. Oxford: James Currey. Alpers, Edward A. (2005). Introduction: Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa. In: Zimba, Benigna / Alpers, Edward A. / Isaacman, Allen F. (Eds.), Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa. Maputo: Filsom Entertainment, pp. 1–12. Austen, Ralph A. (1988). The 19th Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census. In: Slavery and Abolition, 9 (3), pp. 21–44. Baldwin, Kate (2016). The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Banshchikova, Anastasia A. / Ivanchenko, Oxana V. (2019). Historical Memory of the 19th-Century Arab Slave Trade in Modern-Day Tanzania: Between Family Trauma and State-Planted Tolerance. In: Bondarenko, Dmitri M. / Butovskaya, Marina L. (Eds.), The Omnipresent Past: Historical Anthropology of Africa and African Diaspora. Moscow: LRC, pp. 23–45. Beetham, David (1991). The Legitimation of Power. London: Macmillan. Bennett, Norman R. (1978). A History of the Arab State of Zanzibar. London: Harper & Row. Blommaert, Jan (2014). State Ideology and Language in Tanzania. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Blommaert, Jan (2006). Ujamaa and Creation of the New Waswahili. In: van der Walt, Christa (Ed.), Living through Languages: An African Tribute to René Dirven. Stellenbosch: Sun, pp. 5–22. Bondarenko, Dmitri M. / Butovskaya, Marina L. (Eds.) (2019). The Omnipresent Past: Historical Anthropology of Africa and African Diaspora. Moscow: LRC. Bondarenko, Dmitri M. (2016). The Postcolonial World: Nation-Building and the Historical Past. In: Tishkov, Valery A. / Filippova, Elena I. (Eds.), Cultural

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

57

Complexity of Modern Nations. Moscow: Politicheskaja entsiklopedija, pp. 224–240. (in Russian). Bondarenko, Dmitri M. (2014). Historical Memory and Intercultural Tolerance: Students’ Attitudes to the Colonialism-Born Minorities in Tanzania and Zambia. In: Social Evolution and History, 13 (2), pp. 97–118. Bondarenko, Dmitri M. / Krishna, Kamini / Krishna, Radhe (2013). A View from Campus: The Attitude of University Students to the European and South Asian Minorities in Tanzania and Zambia Compared. In: Anthropos, 108 (1), pp. 77–95. Bondarenko, Dmitri M. (2010). Education and Tolerance in Tanzania (by the Evidence Collected by the Russian Anthropological Expedition in 2003 and 2005). In: Vinokurov, Yuri N. (Ed.), Julius Kambarage Nyerere: the First President of Independent Tanzania. Moscow: Institute for African Studies Press, pp. 56–62 (in Russian). Bondarenko, Dmitri M. (1997). The Theory of Civilizations and Dynamics of Historical Process in Precolonial Tropical Africa. Moscow: Institute for African Studies Press (in Russian). Breuilly, John (1993). Nationalism and the State. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Campbell, Gwyn (2016). East Africa in the Early Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: The Zanj Revolt Reconsidered. In: Campbell, Gwyn (Ed.), Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 275–303. Chittick, Neville H. (1970). East African Trade with the Orient. In: Richards, Donald S. (Ed.), Islam and the Trade of Africa: Papers on Islamic History. Vol. II. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, pp. 97–104. Cohen, Ronald / Toland, Judith D. (Eds.) (1988). State Formation and Political Legitimacy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Collins, Robert O. (2006). The African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands. In: African and Asian Studies, 5 (3–4), pp. 325–346. Cooper, Frederick (1977). Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Croucher, Sarah K. (2015). Capitalism and Cloves: An Archaeology of Plantation Life on Nineteenth-Century Zanzibar. New York, NY: Springer. Denisova, Tatiana S. (2020). The Role of Traditional Leaders in the Political Life of West Africa: The Case of Ghana. In: Bondarenko, Dmitri M. / Kowalewski, Stephen A. / Small, David B. (Eds.), The Evolution of Social Institutions: Interdisciplinary Perspective. Cham: Springer, pp. 371–384. Earle, Timothy (1997). How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ellis, Stephen / ter Haar, Gerrie (2004). Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. London: Hurst & Company.

58 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Fabian, Steven (2013). East African Gorée: Slave Trade and Slave Tourism in Bagamoyo, Tanzania. In: Canadian Journal of African Studies, 47 (1), pp. 95–114. Feierman, Steven (1974). The Shambaa Kingdom: A History. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Fouéré, Marie-Aude (2014). Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa, and Political Morality in Contemporary Tanzania. In: African Studies Review, 57 (1), pp. 1–24. Gathara, Patrick (2011). Have Tanzanians Kept Faith with Nyerere’s Ideals? In: The East African, 12–18 December, p. 8. Gellner, Ernest (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gerbeau, Hubert (1979). The Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean: Problems Facing the Historian and Research to be Undertaken. In: UNESCO (Ed.), The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Paris: UNESCO, pp. 184–207. Giblin, James (2005). The Slave Trade, the Hegemony of Paternalism, and Their Place in the National History of Tanzania. In: Zimba, Benigna / Alpers, Edward A. / Isaacman, Allen F. (Eds.), Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa. Maputo: Filsom Entertainment, pp. 31–57. Glassman, Jonathon (2011). War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Glassman, Jonathon (1995). Feasts and Riot. Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Graetz, Tilo (2002). A Social Anthropological Critique of a Political Science Approach to Power: The African Case. In: Beliaev, Dmitri D. / Bondarenko, Dmitri M. / Frantsouzoff, Serguei A. (Eds.), Second International Conference “Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations”: Abstracts. Moscow: Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies Press, pp. 158–159. Gromova, Nelli V. (2012). The Present and the Future of Swahili Language in East and Tropical Africa (Ethno-Linguistic Situation). In: Balezin, Aleksandr S. (Ed.), African Studies in Russia and Abroad: Stages, Trends, and Prospects. Moscow: Institute of World History Press, pp. 255–263 (in Russian). Hart, Keith (2011). Jack Goody’s Vision of World History and African Development Today: Goody Lecture 2011. Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Haskin, Jeanne M. (2005). The Tragic State of the Congo: From Decolonization to Dictatorship. New York, NY: Algora Publishing. Hassler, Malin (2012). Neotraditionalism  – Examining the Role of Traditional Revival in Vanuatu. BA thesis. Kalmar; Växjö: Linnaeus University, http:// www.diva-­portal.org/smash/get/diva2:540690/FULLTEXT01.pdf, accessed February 8, 2021.

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

59

Hooper, Jane / Eltis, David (2013). The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic Slavery. In: Slavery and Abolition, 34 (3), pp. 353–375. Horáková, Hana (2011). Introduction: The Predicament of the Concept of Power in Africa. In Horáková, Hana / Nugent, Paul / Skalník, Peter (Eds.), Africa: Power and Powerlessness. Berlin: Lit, pp. 9–21. Horáková, Hana / Nugent, Paul / Skalník, Peter (Eds.) (2011). Africa: Power and Powerlessness. Berlin: Lit. Hurreiz, Sayyid H. (1985). Origins, Foundation and Evolution of Swahili Culture. In: Ogot, Bethwell A. (Ed.), Distinctive Characteristics and Common Features of African Cultural Areas South of the Sahara. Paris: UNESCO, pp. 101–123. Ivanchenko, Oxana V. (2019). School Textbook as a Way to Stable Nation: Sources of Historical Memory about the 19th Century Arab Slave Trade in Modern-Day Tanzania. In: Krylova, Natalia L. / Grishina, Nina V. / Ksenofontova, Natalia A. (Eds.), Young People in Political and Socio-Cultural Life of Africa. Moscow: Institute for African Studies Press, pp.  90–102 (in Russian). Ivanchenko, Oxana V. (2013). Tanzania: National and Ethnic Self-Consciousness. In: Azia i Afrika segodnja, 6, pp. 53–59 (in Russian). Jakwa, Tinashe (2017). African Realism: Reconceptualising Notions of State Weakness in Western Thought. In: Lyons, Tania (Ed.), Conference Proceedings. “Africa: Moving the Boundaries”. 39th Annual African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP) Conference, 5–7 December 2016, The University of Western Australia. Perth: AFSAAP, pp.  72–85. Retrieved from http://afsaap.org.au/assets/9-­Tinashe-­Jakwa.pdf. Jewsiewicki, Bogumil (2010). The Historical Memory and Representation of New Nations in Africa. In: Diawara, Mamadou / Lategan, Bernard / Rüsen, Jörn (Eds.), Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in an Intercultural Context. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, pp. 53–66. Kake, Ibrahima Baba (1979). The Slave Trade and the Population Drain from Black Africa to North Africa and the Middle East. In: UNESCO (Ed.), The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Paris: UNESCO, pp. 164–174. Kanana, Fridah Erastus (2013). Examining African Languages as Tools for National Development: The Case of Kiswahili. In: The Journal of Pan African Studies, 6 (6), pp. 41–68. Kavina, Alexander (2020). Positive and Negative Aspects of Globalization in Nation Building in Africa. In: Journal of the Institute for African Studies, 1 (50), pp. 59–70. Klein, Martin A. (2005). Slavery: Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean. In: Shillington, Kevin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of African History. New  York, NY: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp. 1382–1384.

60 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Korotayev, Andrey V. / Khaltourina, Daria А. (2008). The Arabs in Tanzania. In: Korotayev, Andrey V. / Demintseva, Ekaterina B. (Eds.), Interracial and Interethnic Relations in Contemporary Tanzania. Moscow: LENAND, pp. 8–27 (in Russian). Kurtz, Donald V. (2001). Political Anthropology. Paradigms and Power. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kurtz, Donald V. (1994). Cultural Identity, Politics and Legitimation. In: van Bakel, Martin / Hagesteijn, Renée / van de Velde, Pieter (Eds.), Pivot Politics: Changing Cultural Identities in Early State Formation Processes. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, pp. 31–46. Lentz, Carola (2006). Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lindström, Jan (2019). Muted Memories: Heritage-Making, Bagamoyo, and the East African Caravan Trade. New York, NY: Berghahn. Lodhi, Abdulaziz Yusuf (1986). The Arabs in Zanzibar (From the Sultanate to the People’s Republic). In: Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 7 (2), pp. 404–418. Lofchie, Michael F. (1965). Zanzibar: Background to Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longair, Sarah (2016). Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897–1964. Abingdon: Routledge. Mann, Michael (1986–2012). The Sources of Social Power. (4 Volumes) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mbogoni, Lawrence E.Y. (2012). Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota. Mtavangu, Norbert (2017). The Tanzanian Multilingual State: Hostility towards It and Strategy to Protect It. In: Negga, Delombera / Chan, Daniel / Szirmai, Monika (Eds.), Language Policy, Ideology and Educational Practices in a Globalised World. Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, pp. 71–85. Ndaluka, Thomas Joseph (2012). Religious Discourse, Social Cohesion and Conflict: Muslim-Christian Relations in Tanzania. Münster: Lit. Niang, Amy (2018). The Postcolonial African State in Transition: Stateness and Modes of Sovereignty. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Nugent, Paul (2011). States and Social Contracts in Africa: Time, Space and the Art of the Possible. In: Horáková, Hana / Nugent, Paul / Skalník, Petr (Eds.), Africa: Power and Powerlessness. Berlin: Lit, pp. 22–43. Ogot, Bethwell A. (1979). Population Movements between East Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Neighbouring Countries. In: UNESCO (Ed.), The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Paris: UNESCO, pp. 175–182. Pearson, Michael N. (1998). Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  WHOSE STATE? WHOSE NATION? 

61

Petterson, Don (2002). Revolution in Zanzibar. Boulder, CO: Westview. Poncian, Japhace (2015). Christian-Muslim Relations in Tanzania: A Threat to Future Stability and Peace? In: Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 5 (3), pp. 54–64. Prins, Adriaan Hendrik Johan (1967). The Swahili-Speaking Peoples of Zanzibar and the East African Coast: Arabs, Shirazi and Swahili. London: International African Institute. Rhodes, Daniel T. (2018). History, Materialization, and Presentation of Slavery in Tanzania. In: Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, 7 (2), pp. 165–191. Rukyaa, Julian Joseph (2007). Muslim-Christian Relations in Tanzania with Particular Focus on the Relationship between Religious Instruction and Prejudice. In: Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 18 (2), 189–204. Sheriff, Abdul (2005). Slave Trade and Slave Routes of the East African Coast. In: Zimba, Benigna / Alpers, Edward A. / Isaacman, Allen F. (Eds.), Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa. Maputo: Filsom Entertainment, pp. 13–38. Sheriff, Abdul (1987). Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East Africa Commercial Empire in the World Economy, 1770–1873. London: James Currey. Spear, Thomas (2003). Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa. In: Journal of African History, 44 (1), pp. 3–27. Strandes, Justus (1961). The Portuguese Period in East Africa. (First published in German in 1899). Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau. Tetti, Martin B. (2014). What Went Wrong in Tanzania: How Does Religious Tension is threatening National Unity and Cohesion. In: International Journal of Education and Research, 2 (6), pp. 503–510. Vernet, Thomas (2009). Slave Trade and Slavery on the Swahili Coast, 1500–1750. In: Mirzai, Behnas A. / Montana, Ismael Musah / Lovejoy, Paul E. (Eds.), Slavery, Islam and Diaspora. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 37–76. Werbner, Richard P. (1998). Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe. In: Werbner, Richard P. (Ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books, pp. 71–102. Winans, Edgar V. (1962). Shambala, the Constitution of a Traditional State. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wynne-Jones, Stephanie (2011). Recovering and Remembering a Slave Route in Central Tanzania. In: Lane, Paul J. / MacDonald, Kevin C. (Eds.), Slavery in Africa: Archaeology and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 317–342.

62 

D. M. BONDARENKO ET AL.

Young, Crawford (2012). The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Young, Crawford / Turner, Thomas (1985). The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Zimba, Benigna / Alpers, Edward A. / Isaacman, Allen F. (Eds.) (2005). Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa. Maputo: Filsom Entertainment.

Between Ethnicity and Medicine: Reinventing Legitimacy in Chokwe and Sukuma Chieftaincies Koen Stroeken and Felix U. Kaputu

1   Introduction This chapter illustrates the relevance of precolonial political systems in two groups bordering the Great Lakes in equatorial Africa, one located at its eastern edge in Tanzania, Sukuma-speaking, and the other bordering in the south in the DRC, Chokwe-speaking. We focus on the ways in which chiefs today seek legitimacy in their communities. Our intention is to explain historical change from an insider’s (emic) perspective. After the colonial period, when mimicking the colonizer’s power symbolized in official uniform and pomp provided the alterity the equatorial chief needed to set himself apart in a ravaged world, we observe a postcolonial turn in the rekindled interest in the ‘life-medicine’ that was once

K. Stroeken (*) African Studies, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] F. U. Kaputu English Department, Fordham University, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_3

63

64 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

required of precolonial rulers. Life-medicine, whose adjective we shorten here to ‘medicinal’, refers to local practices of intervention encountered across Bantu-speaking Africa in various concepts (e.g., nkumi, bufumu, bugota, and lemba) yet invariably combining ritual symbols, initiatory knowledge, and medicinal ingredients to protect or restore the ‘life-force’ or fertility, of land and people, whereby culturally the micro- and macrolevels of wellbeing are not separated. Life-force permeates the bodily, cosmological, and social fields (Devisch 1993). The concept of life-medicine presents a challenge to the social sciences, given the latter’s divide between the individual and the collective. Related to this divide is the separation between private and public, whereby chiefs would perform ‘public healing’, whereas commoners would not (cf. Feierman 1995). We prefer lifemedicine and alternatively political medicine (with politico-medicinal as adjective) to the conventional term of cosmological or ritual medicine, for better bridging a second socio-scientific divide, that between politics and religion, which does not apply to precolonial traditions either. ‘Medicinal’ is meant to comprise both political and religious aspects. The traditional expectation of the chief representing the alterity of the forest and mastering life-medicine originating in the forest was rejected during colonization, because a chief’s position was justified on the grounds of his representing an ethnic identity in a given territory, as well as through his service as tax-collector and enactor of colonial law. The ethnic basis of chieftaincy, which took root particularly during Belgian colonization in central Africa, persisted in the national context after Independence. Our chapter touches briefly on this ‘colonial’ chieftaincy and its ongoing salience in the DRC. The core set of data, though, concerns the first, neo-­ traditional type of legitimacy re-emerging in areas remote from the political capital. At the Congolese-Zambian border, Chokwe paramountcy reintroduces a matri-focal, medicinal form of political legitimacy in contrast with the administrative representation by officially appointed chiefs. A similar example we encounter in Sukuma chiefdoms in northwest Tanzania, where the ritual practices of a locally recognized chief contrast with the ethnic discourse of a folkloristic chief employed as civil servant. However, the Chokwe and Sukuma cases diverge markedly in their integration of life-medicine in politics. Our sketch of hybrid forms of political legitimacy is informed by recent participant observation and in-depth interviews with a Chokwe chief in the DRC and a Sukuma chief in Tanzania. As a baseline serves the first author’s  ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 1999  in

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

65

collaboration with two Sukuma chiefs. The rationale of comparing Chokwe and Sukuma cases lies in their hugely different histories of colonization and national state-formation. In the Congo, the Belgian imposition of new social structures went hand in hand with a Christianization that systematically affected culture in the furthest corners of the missionary’s map. This transformation remained shallow in much of rural Tanzania, with its history of British indirect rule and religiously diverse (e.g., Muslim) population. A second rationale in our comparison of Congo and Tanzania concerns the postcolonial phase of chiefs operating in a respectively weak versus strong state. Congolese chiefs retained a political function at the expense of the medicinal dimension that because of its orientation on power, locally conceived in terms of life-force, comprised both political and ritual or religious elements. In Tanzania, the chief’s medicinal rule lingered in the few areas where the state was virtually absent. In the economically attractive areas controlled by central government, neither the earlier history of governance nor life-medicine could save chieftaincy from complete disappearance.

2   Medicine, Power, and Authority in Equatorial Africa Precolonial political systems in equatorial Africa were marked by different levels of centralization. These centralizations were temporary and differed in impetus: they could be conquest-driven, like the Rwanda and Mangbetu states, or they could be cult-based as in Maniema societies in eastern Congo. Some centralizations were entirely trade-driven, as was the ndunga association regulating trade in Kongo during waning kingship in the nineteenth century (Vansina 1990, p.  221). The diversity of leaderships did not preclude their having a commonality that contrasted with European concepts of authority. We will qualify the relative commonality of equatorial African systems as revolving around life-medicine, hence as medicinal in the broad emic sense. Authority, or socially recognized power in Max Weber’s standard definition, is the capacity to wield legitimacy for one’s rule: whether the leader draws on charisma, on established traditions, or on written laws, his (and much less frequently her) impact on the members is to create consensus and social cohesion. In contrast with European chiefs and kings representing a better version of the commoner, or a sacred version embodying the polity (Hocart 1970), precolonial rulers in central

66 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

and eastern Africa, where mainly Bantu languages are spoken, rather incarnate alterity and danger, ‘heat’ (Stroeken 2018; van Binsbergen 1992). In this, they differ from the excellence and peace, ‘coolness’, sought for in a village leader or clan elder. From a structuralist perspective such as de Heusch’s (1985) extrapolating the cognitive structure to human political systems at large, the chief’s dangerous status resembles the aforementioned sacredness deemed universal of kings. Yet, from the perspective of regional comparison we propose here, the definition of chiefly power should be ethnographically informed; it constitutes a unique set of elements as we argue next.1 In the region of central and eastern Africa, a large variety of titles exist to denote the sovereign, but a remarkable tension points to their root meaning, which the first author of this chapter has sought to detect (cf. Stroeken 2018). Kum terms such as n-kum-u or n-kum-i refer in western Bantu-speaking groups to the title of chief, mostly obtained after initiation in return for a lavish feast (Janzen 1982; Vansina 1990), whereas in the zone of the Great Lakes and among Sukuma-Nyamwezi, the kum terms mean healer. Given that all these Bantu groups descend from common ancestors that migrated from the Cameroon grass fields, the shared linguistic root seems to indicate a proto-meaning dating from a common cultural past. What might this meaning be? Wim van Binsbergen (1992, p. 289) has underlined the symbolic and formal correspondence between cults and royal institutions in western Zambia. Still today, in symbolic discourse encountered in a wide belt south of the African equator, we observe that healer and chief together constitute a category of power that should be differentiated from the authority of elders and headmen, whose titles such as n-kul-u refer to a second Bantu concept. The titles with stem kum evoke fame in contrast with the stem kul meaning seniority, itself associated with respect.2 From ethnographic experience in the particular Bantu-speaking community of Sukuma farmers, we know that a distinction is locally made between medicinal power and awe, on the one hand, and authority or dignity and respect, on the other hand. Authority is reserved for elders, representing a family or clan. Village meetings led by 1  The distinction between chief and king, the latter referring to a sovereign or paramount of a centralized state, is not maintained in this chapter, since traditional leaders in the postcolonial societies under study can only operate under the supreme power of the state, hence only as ‘chiefs’ theoretically. 2  For a more elaborate discussion of sources, among others Schoenbrun’s Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary, I refer to Stroeken (2018, pp. 122–123).

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

67

a headman and under guidance of elders ensure political consensus. The chief or king, though, operates at the level of the chiefdom, watching over the fertility of the land and all inhabitants, after being initiated in the dynastic clan’s initiatory knowledge, especially rain medicine. Descending from a medicinal-dynastic clan, he transcends all clan interests in order to judge cases involving parties from different clans and, importantly, to deal with the land and its fertility, which concerns all clans and requires a special bond, through ritual and divination, with the forces of the forest and the night. The chief’s possession of a healer’s qualities not necessarily conflicts with the dual theoretical model of (political) hegemony and (spiritual) resistance whereby cults level social criticism at colonial rule (Feierman 1995). However, the tenor of our analysis changes because of what can be discerned as a precolonial cultural logic: established authority primarily referred to the gerontocratic clan and not to the chief and his clan that came from outside to found a dynasty as newcomers among an existing community (de Heusch 1982). The royal court’s rituals and myths reproduce this alterity. As a result, we must rethink revolt or insurgency. The Chwezi spirit cult, for instance, does not challenge the chief, whose rule is also spirit-based, but the clan and its elders who have direct say over the youth’s daily activities; conversely, villagers oppose the Chwezi cult while chiefs rely on the help of Chwezi healers to reinforce their medicinal interventions for the fertility of the chiefdom (Stroeken 2010, p. 219). Whereas the chief sometimes challenges the elders of other clans, spirit cults rarely have interest in or collide with the worldly claims of the chief. Both institutions operate, in different ways, in the field of subversion against established authority, of kum against kul. Whether the subversion is cultic or dynastic, it will have a medicinal basis. The Bantu-speaking chief has rain medicine or a supporting spirit to mediate life originating from the realm of the forest. This chapter seeks to capture the endogenous meanings of power by applying two dimensions to contemporary forms of chieftaincy in the region. We shun the concept of ‘customary authority’ because of the European (Weberian) opposition of power and authority. This pair of terms lacks the sense of admiration and awe people feel for something or someone absolutely different. To evince this third meaning, we opt for the concept of life-medicine. The chief himself  is ‘the medicine’, an awe-­ inspiring life-force even if it is something he as a former commoner has the dynasty and the spirits to thank for, as opposed to a power or authority he would have personally earned. He represents the potent part of the land,

68 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

the rain shrine or the drum, that no other human could or probably would want to embody. As if being the medicine itself, he alone obeys seasonal taboos on leaving the palace, crossing rivers and bodily purity so as to keep his fertility from being spoiled (Tcherkézoff 1983). One way for a social scientist to apply this symbolic structure has been exemplified by Wijsen and Tanner (2002, p.  77) in their lucid account on ‘Indirect Rule in Sukumaland’ mentioning an inverse correlation between a colonial chief’s political sophistication and his use of rain medicine. Another way is the attempt at emic interpretation we defend here, inferring that democracy and ethnic representation are the least of the chief’s concerns. The territorial significance of his rule is not strictly delimited because it indirectly emanates from the waxing and waning success of his court in mobilizing neighbouring groups, itself a governance issue, hence of secondary importance. Following this ethnographically determined set of oppositions, the present chapter distinguishes four types of legitimacy: the (ethnic) territoriality of colonial Congolese chiefs (derived from governance logic), the (territorial) ethnicity of Tanzanian chiefs (complying with state ideology), the medicinal neo-tradition of Sukuma chiefs in Tanzania, and the medicinal (non-territorial) inclusive ethnicity of the Chokwe chief. Our presentation starts with a comparison of Sukuma chiefdoms, illuminating the medicinal versus ethnic dimensions. The combination of both will permit us to capture the current hybrid form of Chokwe chieftaincy, which diverges from the legally defined colonial chief.

3   Medicinal Rule in Bulima and Busiha Chiefdoms 3.1  Chieftaincy as Initiatory Medicine In the morning of January 12, 2018, the first author was in the company of Chief Edward Makwaia of Busiha chiefdom and several of his courtiers to attend the narration of court historian Daudi Ngonyeji. With no other mnemonic before him than the succession list of batemi (translatable as chiefs), he began to recount in Swahili for two consecutive days the history of the chiefdom (butemi) of Busiha (also written Busiya). After about two hours of monologue, when for the fourth time the oral tradition required of him to describe the oracle designating the next heir, he looked the first author in the eye to verify whether he knew the obvious. His words delivered with restrained aplomb crackled in the small room: “As

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

69

you should know, doctor, here the basis of rule is not politics but medicine”.3 By medicine, he meant more than a recipe with metaphorically rich ingredients adding social direction to the pure force of forest plants. Medicine incorporates the will of ancestors through oracle. Unlike technology, medicine’s efficacy depends on the mediation of uncontrollable spirits. If a medicine loses its reputation after repeated failure, it will be replaced, just as a Sukuma chief used to be who failed to deliver rain. He was strangled until his tears announced the first raindrops. The second day of narration was punctuated by a visit to Busiha court and a closed meeting with the courtiers, entitled banang’oma, ‘the children of the drum’. Each courtier in the circle detailed the medicinal specialization he had traditionally inherited from the forefathers. Each could attribute his line of ‘drum-membership’ to descent from a former chief or to an alliance in the past with the dynastic clan. Outside in the courtyard, the mediums of the Chwezi spirit cult danced and played their drums while speaking in their esoteric language, as they do during enthronement when the new heir is initiated into chiefship. Again, the close affinity between cult and chiefship appeared. The two institutions have since long worked together in service of cultivation. Around November, ng’weji gwa igabanha, the first month of the old Sukuma calendar, the busunzuula ceremony traditionally took place, when the hair of the chief was shaven, made ready to grow like the crops on his fertile land. For this occasion, the chief must offer a treat of traditional beer to the members, which in his case are the banang’oma, clan members acting both as benefactors and recipients of the organization he presides. In this he acts like the heads of medicinal societies, such as Chwezi, Yeye, Galu, or Gika, who have climbed the highest rank by treating the members to ceremonial beer during ritual initiation. The head shaving is done in the privacy of the round seclusion house, itemelo, where the chief was installed and his predecessor buried. As soon as his head is shaven and he has dipped his finger in the beer, he steps out of the seclusion house to be hailed by the public. Untemi ufuma, ‘the chief has come out’. The same verb and action of leaving the seclusion hut marks the end of any initiation in the community. The chief wears a ndeji bracelet made of fibres of the ng’hoja tree and a shell (shilungu) like 3  In the Sukuma language, one uses the word bugota for medicine, without moral overtones. When translating to Kiswahili, the speaker will say dawa, equally as a general category with good or bad purposes (by adding ya kienyeji it becomes specified as traditional healing).  Yet the Kiswahili word ‘dawa’ comprises also pharmaceuticals.

70 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

that of healers. The Sukuma chief has his caretaker: ntemi ng’hoja, ‘the cooling chief’, named after the dynasty’s medicinal tree. At ceremonies, he sips the beer to sprinkle the ancestral altars with it. The expert leading the royal ceremony is called kanumba, literally ‘small house’, which was also the title for the master of ceremonies in the Chwezi spirit cult that initiated the first author in May 1997. Only the Chwezi dancers and the chief, headed by the kanumba, are allowed to enter the itemelo. The Chwezi ‘give birth’, kubyala, to the new heir, which is the expression used for anyone getting initiated in a cult. Whether entailing enthronement or cultic incorporation, a medicinal empowerment occurs. 3.2   Rain Medicine in Bulima and a Chief’s Contested Legitimacy The following data describes, within Sukuma society and spanning a period of half a century, the colonial and postcolonial succession struggles in the chiefdom of Bulima, seen from the perspective of the main contender, the late Chief Kishina. His life history illustrates the political role of medicine, here of rainmaking, and the impact of the colonial administration’s indifference to life-medicine, which is best contextualized in light of Sukuma cosmology. Bulima’s royal tribulations are contrasted with the clean ‘cultural break’ achieved in another Sukuma chiefdom, that of Ndagalu, at the occasion of the royal shaving ceremony, the Busunzuula we just introduced. In the first case, traditional and colonial expectations collide in 1951, having reverberations many years later in the early 1990s in the last appointed chief’s refusal to return home. The second case stages a chief coming to greet his people in the mid-1990s, only to bury chiefship for good. In both cases, the significance of chieftaincy 30 years after its abolishment in Tanzania underlines the limitations of legal history. The Tanzanian postcolonial state was blind to the precolonial model of rule, which was primarily medicinal. In November 1996, Paulo Magufuli and the first author did two interviews with the deposed chief Kishina at his home in Nange. The author last revisited the compound in September 2015 for interviews with his descendants. Stanislaus Kishina was born in 1922. His father, Kisabo, had succeeded Nkondo, whose predecessor was Lunyalula. After the First World War, German Tanganyika had become British, whose indirect rule required the integration of chieftaincy into the colonial administration. A palace was built in 1920 for court hearings and the

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

71

storage of files. Oral traditions on the dynastic genealogy were collected in 1923. In these traditions, it is said that eighteen successions before Kishina, the hunter Shimawa who emigrated from Buha at Lake Tanganyika, founded the dynasty. Counting roughly fifteen years on average for each reign, like the previous four, this should have been around 1700, which is about fifty years after the establishment of the first Sukuma chiefs according to the archaeological survey of Mwanza region by Soper and Golden (1969) and confirmed by the oral traditions they consulted. In the previous century, the intrusion of Lwoo-speaking peoples in Bunyoro and Buganda had caused southern migration of Hima, Hinda, Tusi, and Chwezi to the plains of Sukuma and Nyamwezi, a long-time haven for victims of the warring kingdoms in the west (Holmes and Austen 1972, pp. 380–381). The chief’s application of the rain medicine commences with respectfully attributing its origins to the dynastic clan founded by Shimawa, whom Kishina addresses as his ‘director’ (ng’hulugenji). Since the medicinal dimension of chieftaincy eluded the British administration, the governor decided that a public election would be organized in February 1951 between two young relatives of the chief whom the British had deposed. The election pitted Kishina, the native candidate proposed by the palace’s advisory council, against Francisco Gama Ngalula, a man educated at the prestigious government school of Tabora and actually a dynastic member via his maternal line. Kishina won the vote, but soon the British intervened to put Ngalula in charge. After his death in 1992, the palace appointed a grandson, Jackson Mabula. Tragically, he died a few months later, kindling suspicions of witchcraft in the direction of Kishina. The information we obtained in 1996 from the daughter of Ngalula was that she had become the queen mother because the palace—in fact a few banang’oma living in it—had appointed her son Madaha, another grandson of the late Ngalula. Madaha Sicora lived in Dar es Salaam and worked as a car mechanic but would soon return to the palace in Igokelo to claim the throne of Bulima. He never did. The queen mother was very reluctant to give details. Probably Madaha saw no point in accepting an unremunerated job, moreover bound to entice sorcerous retaliations from the royal patri-clan of Kishina, deposed forty years ago and still hoping for a second chance. Madaha’s mother lived at the palace as household head and was not planning to move out. Kishina never accepted his substitute’s rule, dubbing it in Swahili utawala wa bandia, a ‘puppet government’. He alone had been taught to

72 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

make the rain medicine named shilala, consisting of the pounded roots of twenty-six trees mixed with twenty symbolically rich additives. The death of chieftaincy and the reduction to its bare essence meant that he could treat the rain medicine as cultic knowledge. At the time, he indeed had two novices learning the exclusive trade of rainmaker. He called them bahemba like all candidates acquiring medicinal knowledge from a healer or cult for a fee. They paid five heads of cattle and ten goats, five times more than novices of the average medicinal cult. Contrary to how we as Europeans are taught to think about chieftainship, namely as a political office and, if endowed with ritual capacity, bound to be divine, Kishina treated the royal tradition as a type of cult and knowledge that he could sell. The political use of it by a dynastic clan tying the medicine to an individual who will protect the fertility of land and people seems like a special case. It is illuminating how Kishina systematically juxtaposed chieftaincy and initiatory association or cult, as two counterparts adopting the same cultural logic. It is on the basis of such symmetry between two options excluding each other in the same competitive field of life-medicine that we may understand why a chief may accumulate the medicinal knowledge of ‘other’ initiatory associations, but is not allowed to climb ranks in these, as he already presides over the dynastic cult. In brief, we are invited to radically alter our view of ‘political’ traditions in the region. Bulima’s history continues up to this day, for an unexpected sequel to Kishina’s story unfolded in January 2018. Madaha, the car mechanic made chief who never showed up, re-emerged in Igokelo. During a visit to the dilapidated palace, the first author stumbled upon him, a tall man giving a shy impression. He lived alone in a shabby house in the palace’s backyard. Hesitantly Madaha explained that for the past two years he had been suffering from health problems in Dar es Salaam. His symptoms receded after he returned to the palace, just as a diviner reading his ancestors’ wishes had foretold. How will he live there and maintain the palace since the Tanzanian state does not subsidize chiefs? ‘Tourism?’ he replied hesitantly. The medicinal knowledge, the royal graves, and the shrine with Balongo iron hoes for rainmaking were safely kept by his knowledgeable kin in the clan’s initiatory terrain at the lakeshore in Mbarika, he added (which the first author could later confirm on site, although an evangelically inspired demolition had destroyed the receptacles). All these years Madaha stayed aloof from court politics. The call of his royal ancestors eventually convincing him to take the throne suggests that he too was able to consider

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

73

chieftaincy as something more than politics. What exactly becomes clear when chieftaincy is undermined at its core, as described in the next section. 3.3  The Death of Traditional Chieftaincy in Ndagalu In February 1996, the first author had attended a belated Busunzuula ceremony in the Sukuma chiefdom of Ndagalu. Chief Kapunda Kishosha II held a public speech that would soon turn out to contrast starkly with his traditional outfit of black garment, diadem and ndeji bracelet, as well as with the inauguration song evoking images of blood sacrifice and royal rebirth. What was key in Kishina’s account seemed beside the point in Kapunda’s address. His aim was to play into the (post)colonial concerns of the Tanzanian officials present. The Ndagalu chief did not mention once in his hour-long speech the phrase repeated like a chorus in the account of the Bulima chief: medicine, bugota. Instead, he pleaded to his audience of several hundred for a cultural role squarely locked in history. What we learn from re-enacting tradition, he argued, is that Sukuma people have their own history and traditional system of governance, just as Europeans have. Due to lack of rain medicine to activate for the farmers present, his Busunzuula ceremony turned ethnic. As he delivered his speech in leopard skin outfit and watching some of the civil servants he had invited, his particular chiefdom seemed of lesser importance than the totality of Sukuma traditions, which he compared to European ones and thus related to world history. Like the Chwezi cooperating with the Busiha chief, the society of twins (mabasa) did the ritual honours in this Busunzuula. They danced to the rhythm of Kapunda’s royal drum, celebrating the boundless fertility that put twins on a par with the chief. In public, curiously, no ritual acts were performed, or shrines addressed. Nor had there been an open competition between the dance groups of the medicinal societies, as was the tradition in the plains between villages, with thousands swarming between the two rivalling groups directing magical attacks at each other. Instead, Chief Kapunda had much good advice about care for the environment, solidarity, and the problem of witchcraft beliefs. The waning enthusiasm of the crowd during his speech illustrated what was lacking. Unlike Kishina so eager to play his role, Kapunda put the ritual load on the Mabasa society. He was happy to draw his ‘customary authority’ only from the Busunzuula festival he presided. Keeping his hands clean from life-medicine seemed the best option to have his version of chieftaincy tolerated by the Tanzanian government officials present. The authority that chiefs drew on was

74 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

supposed to be no different from any other in the world. It was political, which in the contemporary Tanzanian context means: bound to continue as folklore only. If the chief retained a sparkle of legitimacy, this would be due to his extension of government policy. Our comparison next with a Congolese case of medicinal rule requires we engage with Jan Vansina’s (1990) historical overview of the diverse political systems in central Africa. The endogenous ‘ancestral tradition’ Vansina established draws on the political model of ‘big men’ bent on maintaining the autonomy of their extended family (‘house’) and competing for power in their village, which interlocks with the encompassing third domain (‘district’) that in case of further centralization forms a state. Remarkably, his proposal of an ‘equatorial tradition’ does not mention the main commonality of these systems: that no chief or king ruled without life-medicine, namely charms or shrines, and that all supreme rulers were ritually initiated during enthronement. Most of all, the chief hereby excelled in something everyone of the Bantu-speaking world was socialized in, starting at a basic level during male and female initiations. This forming the kernel of people’s knowledge, how could Vansina depict it as a realm of religious ideology justifying to the populace the acts of those in power? Against this separation of initiatory medicine from political office, Kishina treated the institution of chiefship as a special case of a more general model of medicinal knowledge whereby outsiders climb up as they become initiated. This goes further than what Ranger and Kimambo (1972) achieved, namely acknowledging the ‘religious’ (by which they actually understand ritual-medicinal) features and origins of chieftaincy. Medicinal knowledge, in our accounts mentioned earlier, is the way to lead and protect a people. Therefore, a parallelism existed between cult and dynasty, which showed in precolonial legal practice. We can read in Lagae (1926, p. 133) that even in the centralized Zande state the chiefs had no jurisdiction over inhabitants that were initiated in cults. The latter had their own laws. How to understand this legal pluralism, of state and cult, other than as the symmetry of two accesses to life-medicine? In other words, does an emic approach not require we give up the state as primary model to understand the political, and we rather consider the state as an exceptional outgrowth, however enticingly sophisticated?

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

75

4   Ethnicity in Colonial Chieftaincy: The Case of the DRC An extreme type of intervention in the local ways of maintaining peace was the Belgian colonial policy of assigning chiefs as ethnic representatives, also in multicultural areas where hardly any group predominated. The colonial starting point was a map with districts and borders to be covered politically by local representation. The logic has persisted in the DRC, particularly after the state perceived itself as weak. Its law N° 15/015 of August 25, 2015, determining the status of chefs coutumiers, or ‘customary chiefs’, was installed with the explicit motivation of remedying the country’s lack of moral guidance through ‘apolitical’ chiefs supporting the national government.4 A three-tiered division of chiefs is implanted (chefferie, groupement, village), each designated according to a community’s local customs and on the condition of governmental approval. The division further simplifies the earlier structure of provinces, villes, communes, territoires, chefferies, groupements, and villages to which the DRC’s law N° 08/016 of October 7, 2008, referred, and which Buaguo Mosabi and Fufulafu Zaniwe (2012) criticized for claiming a cultural homogeneity that is structurally impossible and in practice belied by the heterogeneity of chefferies. Mosabi and Zaniwe give the example of Upper Uele where chiefdoms attributed to Mangbetu chiefs are populated by other groups. Mboli chiefdom, for instance, is inhabited by Mayogo and Manvu groups who have their own political traditions. The colonizer consolidated an arbitrary historical situation that benefitted conquering groups such as Mangbetu and Zande developing states at the time. When the colonizer chose chiefs from a foreign clan that had conquered territory, such as the Avongara dynasty in Zande society, the colonial recognition of their power meant something new, rendering the chief’s power radically more consequential, politically and economically, in terms of tax paying, forced labour, and jurisdiction. Zaire under Mobutu treated chiefs as government representatives, which at village level often meant unmitigated power over community members. Interestingly, Mosabi and Zaniwe use the word secteur, sector, to reject the putative 4  We thank Hatege Tunzi for his overview of Congolese law on chieftaincy and related references including this one: Loi n°15/015 du 25 août 2015 fixant le statut des chefs coutumiers. Retrieved from https://www.leganet.cd/Legislation/Droit%20Public/ Administration.ter/Loi%2015.015.2015.html

76 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

homogeneity of chiefdoms. The notion of secteur, a collection of communities, was invented by the Belgian colonizer to distinguish chiefdoms without ethnic homogeneity (Dumont 1943). Privileges of self-­ determination were granted to precolonial systems such as Rwandan kingship that were exceptionally based on a national or ethnic structure. Those kings, just like the chiefs in less centralized systems, however had medicinal power mediated by dynastic spirits. When not expertise (like Kishina’s rain medicine) but ethnicity is the primary basis of chieftaincy, the forest-­ based life-force from which the rule of both kings and chiefs stems loses its importance. Adopting this logic, the Congolese constitution stipulates that chiefs be democratically chosen. Ethnicity is a central criterion to speak of chieftaincy in DRC, as opposed to precolonial times, when communities had their families and headmen to settle political and economic issues, and they turned to the level of the chiefdom—if present—for protection against spatially wider threats or to judge grave offences endangering the community’s peace beyond the control of clans or cults. The former section described the absence of ethnicity in one Sukuma chiefdom and its unexpected appearance in another, as well as the role of ethnicity in colonial chieftaincy. The comparison will serve us next in discerning the particular type presented by Chokwe chiefship today, wherein medicine has regained salience in combination with a cosmopolitan type of ethnicity. We speak of a festival-based customary authority preoccupied with the public perception of Chokwe ethnicity within the DRC and neighbouring countries. It has a medicinal quality in the subdued form of the youth’s annual circumcision ceremony and a support scheme for social security focused on medical solidarity in case of illness. In reproducing and reinventing precolonial traditions, Chokwe chieftaincy today diverges from the state’s notion of customary authority oriented on governance and ethnic representation. Perhaps for that very reason, the Chokwe chief seems capable of evoking collective belonging.

5   Festival-Based Chieftaincy and Inclusive Ethnicity: The Chokwe Case In the three-hour-long interview the two authors of this chapter had with the new Chokwe paramount, Mwatshisenge Lwembe Ngweji Musanya III, a stark contrast came to the fore with the governance-oriented role of chiefs recognized by the state of the DRC, publicly appearing since

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

77

colonial times in uniform or suit. The Chokwe chief, or king, wore traditional attire, with leopard skin, whisk, and medicinal protection, which during colonial times would commonly be disparaged as backwards. He began by emphasizing the importance of women at his court, each of whom he suggested to possess special medicine, yet whose details he did not want to divulge. The soul of the realm, Mwatshisenge stated, is traditionally formed by the five wives, named ‘the advisors’ (myozovu): the First Lady (Mwatha Mali), the Gift and Hope (Tetwama), Guardian of the Soul (Mwadia Mono), The Economist (Fama), and Heart of the King (Mbunge wa Mwene). If the king is married to one wife, she is supposed to represent every characteristic mentioned earlier. Except for the king’s oldest son, protecting him as holder of the gun (Mwauta), the only family members with an assigned function are women: his mother Namalunga, his grandmother Lukhokhesa in charge of determining succession, his maternal aunt Nakabamba, his daughter Namwana (and her husband Samwana), and his sister Nabanze (and her husband Sabanze). The traditionally matrilineal system of kinship in Chokwe society seems to permeate the organization of the court (nganda) of the paramount or king. The ‘uterine’ quality of Chokwe identity in comparison to other groups has been noted before: “Whereas the Luunda setting is characterised by hereditary chiefship (along a patrilineal line) and a strongly centralised polity, the Chokwe are much more acephalous” (De Boeck 1993, p.  95). Luunda rulers were initiated into the secrets of a cultic association, but they nevertheless characterized the Chokwe as their healers. The matri-centered court sheds light on the Chokwe tradition associating power with medicinal knowledge. Knowing the competition between cultic and dynastic leaders over the same symbols, van Binsbergen (1992, p. 289, p. 292) has argued, for an area in Zambia near to Chokwe chiefdoms, that as the power of women as queens decreased in the twentieth century, their role as cult leaders grew. Mwatshisenge has restored the precolonial position of the queen as soul of the realm. The medicinal aspect surfaces also in Mwatshisenge’s account of the chiefdom’s government structure. He differentiates eleven notables (vubu) in service of the realm, together mitigating the paramount’s power. Mwene Swana Mulopo, ‘envoy of the king’, acts as prime minister. Then follow the guardians of security, traditionally specializing in protective medicine: the one of the royal court (Kanapumba wa Mazemba) and of the kingdom (Kanapumba wa Luthwe), as well as the kingdom’s guardians of the entrance (Kalala wa Luthwe) and of the exit (Kalala wa Myima).

78 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

‘Bitterness’ (Kalula) is the judge. Muvumbo, the big drum, is the minister of information. Kumbwoto welcomes and selects visitors to meet the king. Tshakala, ‘provider’, makes sure the people in the realm have enough food and entertainment. Mwinetembo is the itinerant ambassador, speaking in the name of Mwene Mwatshisenge when meeting other rulers. Mwamuyete, the king’s domestic, tests his master’s food for poison. From in-depth interviews in 2015 and 2016 with the Chokwe paramount chief in Lubumbashi and from observations by the second author at the occasion of the annual public ceremony Likumbi Lya Mize across the border in Zambia, we infer that chieftainship can regain momentum if the chief manages to represent ethnic belonging for a population in search of social identity amidst a globalized context, and if his office is associated with a collective social purpose reminiscent of life-medicine. In our case study, the purpose is served by his overseeing a massively attended public performance and by his shepherding a social security fund, in French a mutuelle. In a country where the government after Independence did not seek to manage the public good, these two social activities attain a special meaning reproducing in contemporary form the old chiefly medicine. In the way that popular discourse conceives of the last five Chokwe kings since 1935, the paramountcy survived colonization as well as decolonization by reinventing itself. We observe the contrast with the protracted death of Tanzanian chiefdoms stuck to their medicinal model of rule, which founding president Nyerere (and incumbent of a chiefly throne) had replaced with his national ideology of Ujamaa, African socialism, and Umoja (unity) after banning the institution of chieftaincy. Like the ritual festival, the mutuelle society acts as an ethnic unifier for the diasporic Chokwe. Founded in 2013, the actual function of economic fund is secondary. Primary is the (paradoxically) non-exclusive ethnicity it advocates. To contextualize, we briefly turn to the contemporary history of Chokwe chieftaincy. Since the 1940s, Mwatshisenge Muthunda (whose full name was Samutoma Samanyika Katwatwa Ngoma ja Kwiba Muya Nyi Kanyima) supported anti-colonial sentiments, first symbolically by naming his son Kajila Samutoma, ‘the White Bird’, which was understood by the population as signifying justified resistance against oppression. The purity of the ‘white bird’ refers to the purifying passage ‘through the white’ in rituals of initiation practiced across equatorial Africa, whereby the one smeared with kaolin clay will be blessed with the intervening strength of the ancestral spirit (Janzen 1992). Also, during Muthunda’s reign the monstrous

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

79

Katoyo mask became popular during dance ceremonies and as discursive metaphor, a parody presenting colonials as slow-witted and ignorant of life’s secrets, of initiation particularly. In the late 1950s (and after Independence in the early 1960s), this chief actually supported the secession of Katanga Province. The successor who celebrated Independence was the well-educated Musanya Tshikwambi, reigning from 1957 until 1968. Promoting negotiation instead of violence, this chief obtained from the Belgians the Medal of Good Work and Cooperation on May 29, 1958. His successor Sapindji Celestin I, who had been trained for six months in Belgium, volunteered to work in different ministries of the seceded Katanga in the early 1960s, which caused friction with President Mobutu prior to the latter’s decision of dismantling the functions of chiefs. Under the last years of Mobutu’s regime, the next Mwatshisenge, Muthunda Musanya II, enthroned in 1989, lived until 2008 secluded in a village, resigned to a token monthly payment. The decline of the chieftaincy seems to have stopped with Mwatshisenge Lwembe Ngweji Musanya III, our interlocutor. As he told us, his influence was supposed to be restricted to the village level, but since 2013 among others with the help of the mutuelle (e.g., propagating itself through the website Mutambi) he found the courage to express a vision extending ‘Chokwe culture’ and ‘modernizing its political power’ in the country. Concretely, he sees the mutuelle as an opportunity for Chokwe intellectuals and urban settlers to join their fellows in the rural diaspora and claim a common cultural past. By the latter he envisages a positive concept of ethnicity to harness opportunities in the rapidly globalizing and economically growing region comprising northern Zambia and northeast Angola adjoining the southeast of the DRC. Mwatshisenge spoke of those opportunities in terms of a need, which the next paragraphs elicit. The Chokwe paramount’s use of ethnicity hardly smacks of primordialism or territorialism, or any kind of political discourse able to mobilize a group to claim a territory and challenge the state. The situation varies considerably across east and central Africa. In Tanzania, whose largest ethno-cultural group are Sukuma farmers cherishing their relative autonomy without self-rule, courtesy of an aloof state, ethnicity has been an unlikely catalyst for traditional authority or any federal system (Malipula 2014). An ominous association between ethnicity and chiefdom would be theoretically possible in the Chokwe case. According to the second author, who was born in a Chokwe family, there are two major factors preventing

80 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

this ethnic identity from going awry. First of all, the Chokwe are a highly dispersed diasporic community without clear-cut territorial claims or autochthony. Pulled apart between three countries and the corresponding Belgian, British and Portuguese colonial administrations, the Chokwe chieftaincy had nearly disintegrated. The Belgian policy, put into royal decree in 1910, tended towards manageable chiefdoms of more or less equal size. The principle of divide ut impera initially worked judging by the new conflicts between the appointed Chokwe chiefs over territorial borders, federations, and interference in succession. The protracted wars in Angola left many Chokwe refugees homeless and about on the roads. A recurring discourse in the area recounted the need of uniting the Chokwe people across the borders and at the grassroots level (Kaputu 2014). We thus explain the popularity of the annual public ceremony in Zambia, and its special attraction for Mwatshisenge, who went beyond the village level to follow his heart and call. The ethnicity foregrounded by the king has an inclusive and fluid quality characteristic of Chokwe history. The fluidity of Chokwe identity appeared in the interviews the second author conducted with various participants during the festival of Likumbi Lya Mize, the ‘day of the ancestors’, in 2015 and 2016. The ceremony attended by thousands of Zambians at the border with Congo celebrates the end of the boys’ initiation and circumcision (mukanda). Headed by the Luvale king, Ndungu, on the western bank of the Zambezi river, the Luchazi and Chokwe living in Zambia have since decades joined the final ceremony. When probed about the ethnic difference, the Chokwe respondents invariably explained that they celebrated together because they regarded themselves as culturally belonging to the same group as the Luvale. As a seventy-five-year-old man called Njamba stated: “people are likely to define themselves as members of the major ethnic group”. Here it was Luvale, across the border in Congo it would have been Chokwe. The interchangeability of ethnicity ignores the precolonial and colonial history of rivalries between these chiefdoms in the region. “Nobody even thinks about the difference”, Mujinga, a fifty-four-year-old lady, explained, “our traditional events are quite the same, even if they often occur at different moments in the year”. The Likumbi Lya Mize, presided by a Luvale king, is the kind of public ceremony to which the Zambian state legally limits the subsidized function of chiefs. Because of mixed marriages and migration in this region for a long time, of which the participants are very well aware, the descendants of the listed ancestors—brought to life again in the masks—are not

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

81

confined to one ethnicity. In the same atmosphere of inclusive ethnicity, the freshly initiated have invented new Chokwe masks with local significance as well as universal appeal: Radio, Tower (Telephone Tower), Wato (Boat), Helikpta (Helicopter), Condom, Jinla (giant ostrich), and Tambo (lion). In contrast with the localized, fertility-oriented Busunzuula festival among Sukuma that definitively lost its fervour, the Likumbi Lya Mize has reinvented itself to yearly attract an ever-larger crowd in Zambia. The ritual and popularity attracted the paramount chief of the Chokwe from the Katanga Province, our interlocutor, to cross the border in 2016. Named Mwachisenge (written in French as Mwatshisenge) or ‘owner of the land’ (usenge), an outsider would have expected tension to arise. Instead, the Luvale king invited him to swear in a number of local chiefs. The condition was that the Luvale king would still be considered as their paramount, as he has been since their migration several generations ago. For the first time, Chokwe subchiefs were appointed in Zambia. That the Chokwe paramount could not be an intrinsic competitor to the state, and that his chieftaincy is supposed to be of the non-territorial ethnic kind, is probably best illustrated by the letter the Mutuelle Tshokwe sent on September 19, 2017, to the newly elected president of Angola, Joao Lourenço—putatively of Chokwe descent. After congratulating him, the letter requested for a meeting with the Mutuelle as spokesperson for the Chokwe people “notamment de l’Angola, du Botswana, du Malawi, du Mozambique, de la République Démocratique du Congo, de la Zambie et du Zimbabwe d’une part et de l’autre, toutes les diasporas autour du monde”. The letter adds that the Mutuelle Tshokwe acts on behalf of these people “culturellement, socialement, économiquement et politiquement”. That a social security fund could have such comprehensive task defies the European model which relegates matters of health and wellbeing to a subsection of government. The Chokwe chief and his courtiers here break with the governance-oriented meaning of political power. In this way, we may understand their remarkable supposition that the new president could not see their association as a threat, despite their explicit claim to politically represent a substantial section of the Angolan population.

6   Conclusion The reader is invited to think of power differently. In this part of the world, the use of medicine is amoral; the knowledge of peace-making and protection, but also of invisible warfare does not make one a witch. Chiefs,

82 

K. STROEKEN AND F. U. KAPUTU

healers, and initiatory cults alike clear society of destructive users. At odds with their source of authority was the seniority of clan elders, and still, something else too: the colonial intervention appointing chiefs to represent communities inhabiting certain tracts of land. The colonizer aimed at control over the masses, classifying the population geographically and ethnically. Attention shifted from the chiefdom’s internal peace to the people’s position and impact within a wider structure. The outcome of contestation, delegitimization, and struggles for community-building has been, as elicited by the editors in this volume’s introduction, new regimes of legitimacy. Two local approaches to legitimating chieftaincy, the one ethnic, the other medicinal, have been differentiated and combined in a third. The Tanzanian chiefdoms of Busiha and Bulima hold onto the medicinal model of rule, requiring from the heir an ancestrally supported call as well as a sacrificial initiation into rainmaking by the heir or a courtier. The Ndagalu chief in Tanzania focused instead on public perception, of the chiefdom’s history and culture. His chieftaincy eventually had no other basis than the Busunzuula ceremony of cultivation he organized annually. The Chokwe paramountcy in the DRC also revived itself through a festival-based chieftaincy, although here the concern with public perception concentrated on the inclusive ethnicity of the Chokwe diaspora scattered at the border between the DRC, Zambia, and Angola, and via the Mutuelle across the world. The medicinal dimension lingered in the court’s structure and in the chief’s preoccupation with the collective circumcision ritual. It also seems embryonically reproduced or actualized in the social security fund meant to unite Chokwe migrants. Our tentative comparisons between chiefdoms indicate that much of what constitutes chiefly authority in contemporary cultural inventions from this African region revolves around meanings and tensions with precolonial origins of ongoing salience.

References De Boeck, Filip (1993). Symbolic and Diachronic Study of Inter-Cultural Therapeutic and Divinatory Roles among Aluund (‘Lunda’) and Chokwe in the Upper Kwaango (South Western Zaire). In: Afrika Focus, 9, pp. 73–104. De Heusch, Luc (1985). Sacrifice in Africa: A Structuralist Approach. Manchester: Manchester University Press. De Heusch, Luc (1982). The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

  BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND MEDICINE 

83

Devisch, René (1993). Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, A. (1943). Le Gouvernement du Congo Belge et les Institutions Indigènes. In: Africa, 14 (2), pp. 78–90. Feierman, Steven (1995). Healing as Social Criticism in the Time of Colonial Conquest. In: African Studies, 54, pp. 73–88. Hocart, Arthur M. (1970). Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Holmes, C. F. / Austen, R. (1972). The Precolonial Sukuma. In: Journal of World History, 14, pp. 377–405. Janzen, John M. (1992). Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Janzen, John M. (1982). Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World. New York, NY: Garland. Kaputu, Felix (2014). Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo on the Way to Peace? War Remembrances, Post-Conflict Discourse Construction: A Discursive Analysis of Djungu-Simba’s Novellas. In: Afrika Focus, 27, pp. 9–29. Lagae, C.  R. (1926). Les Azande ou Niam-Niam: L’organisation Zande, croyances religieuses et magiques, coutûmes familiales. Bruxelles: Vromant. Malipula, Mrisho (2014). Depoliticised Ethnicity in Tanzania: A Structural and Historical Narrative. In: Afrika Focus, 27, pp. 49–70. Mosabi, Dieudonné Buaguo / Fufulafu Zaniwe, Amand-Félix (2012). Démocratie et pouvoirs coutumiers dans les chefferies du Haut-Uélé en RDC. Retrieved from www.memoireonline.com/02/12/5412/Democratie-­et-­pouvoirs-­ coutumiers-­dans-­les-­chefferies-­du-­Haut-­Uele-­en-­RDC.html Ranger, Terence O. / Kimambo, Isaria N. (1972). Introduction. In: Ranger, Terence O. / Kimambo, Isaria N. (Eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion. London: Heinemann. Soper, Robert C. / Golden, Bernard (1969). An Archaeological Survey of Mwanza Region, Tanzania. In: Azania, 4, pp. 15–79. Stroeken, Koen (2018). Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa. Oxford: Berghahn. Stroeken, Koen (2010). Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft. Oxford: Berghahn. Tcherkézoff, Serge (1983). Le Roi nyamwezi, la droite et la gauche: révision comparative des classifications dualistes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vansina, Jan (1990). Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Van Binsbergen, Wim M.  J. (1992). Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and History in Central Western Zambia. London: Paul Kegan. Wijsen, Frans J. S. / Tanner, Ralph (2002). ‘I Am Just a Sukuma’: Globalization and Identity Construction in Northwest Tanzania. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

PART II

Contested Authorities and State Power

By What Authority? Cosmology, Legitimacy, and the Sources of Power in Malawi Arne S. Steinforth

1   The Powers That Be in Malawi Despite the deeply “entrenched inequalities” (Englund 2006, p. 11) consolidating its ongoing status as one of the poorest countries on the globe (see Rompel 2020), Malawi’s post-colonial history has managed to maintain a remarkably high degree of political and social stability. Unlike many other African countries, Malawi’s national past lacks the terrible highlights of military coups and civil wars, of interethnic warfare and rebel armies, child soldiers and rivalling warlords. In the self-proclaimed ‘Warm Heart of Africa’, both colonial rule and post-colonial dictatorship phased out in comparative peace and calm, featuring none of the widespread violence and upheaval—and the profound restructuring of social hierarchies—that may be associated with such dramatic sociopolitical events.1 In turn, 1  Arguably, the two most violent and traumatic incidents in Malawian national history are the failed 1915 anti-colonial uprising headed by the pastor-turned-martyr John Chilembwe—

A. S. Steinforth (*) Department of Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_4

87

88 

A. S. STEINFORTH

contemporary Malawian conceptions of power and authority seem to reflect ongoing processes of social transformation within which continuities and discontinuities—or, in more ideologically loaded terms, allegedly modern and traditional elements—are in constant interaction.2 On the level of ethnographic inquiry, ideas of power and its legitimization pervade the separate spheres of social life, merging national politics and local chieftaincy, economic elites and spiritual leaders within a joint lexicon.3 1.1  Legalities, (il)Legitimacies, and Chosen Ones in Office From the start, the campaign leading up to the 2004 Malawian presidential election seemed to be overshadowed by larger questions concerning political morality. At the time, many people I talked to disapproved of the performance of incumbent president Bakili Muluzi and, by extension, his designated successor Bingu wa Mutharika.4 Muluzi, a successful businessman and veteran politician from the Yao ethnic group,5 had been greeted resulting in the execution of himself and c. 50 of his followers by British colonial troops (see Phiri 1999; Shepperson and Price 2000)—and the death of 51 demonstrators, shot by British forces when protesting against the imprisonment of pro-independence politicians in Nkhata Bay, 1959. Both events are commemorated with national holidays on January 16 (Chilembwe Day) and March 3 (Martyrs Day), respectively. 2  Accordingly, any reference to ‘traditions’ in the context of this chapter reflects local Malawian conceptualizations that may operate with this idiom (e.g. in the case of official governmental terminologies featuring Traditional Authorities or traditional healers) despite the fact that many characteristics of such institutions may, on the level of analysis, be rather novel and ‘modern’ in character. 3  The ethnographic data presented in this chapter were collected over various phases of long-term field research in different districts of Southern Malawi between 2004 and 2020. 4  Throughout my ethnographic accounts, personal names have been modified in order to safeguard the anonymity of my respondents. The only exception to this rule affects the initial cases regarding high-profile and well-reported, public issues of national politics where original names have been maintained. 5  In Malawi, questions of ethnic identity continue to constitute a significant factor in local as well as national debates on power. In the Southern Region, where most of my research has been conducted, local discourse tends to identify ‘Northerners’ (especially those from Tumbuka or Tonga linguistic backgrounds) as beneficiaries of colonial-era favouritism that supported education programs in the North while neglecting the South. Groups identifying as Chewa are often associated with the authoritarian regime of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda who installed them as a central force in the country’s geography of power (e.g. moving the capitol to the Chewa-dominated Central Region and making ChiChewa the national language alongside English). Lomwe-speakers have benefitted from the recent patronage of President Bingu wa Mutharika after considering themselves the country’s forgotten ‘silent

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

89

with a surge of popular support when, in the nation’s first multi-party elections in 1994, he defeated the authoritarian self-appointed ‘Life President’ Hastings Kamuzu Banda (in office 1964 to 1994), thereby ending the one-party system of the latter’s Malawi Congress Party (MCP). Now nearing the end of his second and last term in office, the president and his United Democratic Front (UDF) had however lost much of their initial popularity. Political analysts blamed the ongoing economic plight of the country on his administration’s alleged corruption, misappropriation of foreign donor money, and a lack of concise strategy to ensure the food security of the country’s mostly rural population (see Anders 2009; Cammack and Kelsall 2011; Thorold 2000). Colloquial critiques of Bakili Muluzi, however, often took a less rationalistic tone, relating instead to common narratives of the president being involved in various kinds of ritual activities, including dreaded acts of witchcraft (ufiti), Satanism (usatana), and clandestine rituals of a dubious nature often described as kukhwima or ‘fortifying oneself’ (see Ashforth 2014). By such accounts, Muluzi, who had presented himself as a devout yet modern Muslim upon his ascent to the presidency ten years earlier, had only managed to attain this high office due to the secret support of a close relative who, as a village headman and ritual expert from Muluzi’s home district of Machinga, supplied him with the occult expertise necessary to win the election and remain in office throughout the following legislative periods. While the president, many around me agreed, could never have succeeded in overthrowing Banda, the alleged “ruler of the supernatural” (Van Dijk 2001; Van Donge 2002, p. 17), without gaining access to superior sources of occult power, public discourse had now begun questioning the morality of Muluzi’s own presidency.6 majority’ (Boeder 1984) for decades; as one of the few Muslim-majority population groups in the country, the Yao have historically been marginalized from colonial times onwards before being boosted by Bakili Muluzi’s presidency; many self-identified Ngoni still model themselves around an exceptionalist warrior ideology derived from their historical ties to the South African Zulu; Mang’anja and Sena groups often find themselves depreciated because of the especially impoverished and inaccessible rural conditions of their home districts in the extreme south of the country; and so on. Most discussions of power with Malawian counterparts tend to reference this complex lexicon of perceived inequalities between (and allegedly shared characteristics within) these different linguistic and regional groups. 6  For more information on Banda’s eclectic political role and legacy, see, for example, Englund (1996), Lwanda (1993), Muyebe and Muyebe (1999), Power (2010), Steinforth (2013), Wroe (2020).

90 

A. S. STEINFORTH

With the “lost decade” (Muula and Chanika 2005) of the latter’s regime now coming to an end, few of the people I talked to thought that his hand-picked successor Mutharika, a Catholic economist and shrewd technocrat from Lomwe-dominated Thyolo District, had the political or indeed cosmological clout to compete against the many seasoned politicians now rallying behind his opponents. To the surprise of virtually all my Malawian friends, however, the presidential elections in May 2004 resulted in a decisive victory for Bingu wa Mutharika and a crushing defeat for the Mgwirizano coalition headed by political veteran Gwanda Chakuamba. And rumours soon began circulating that the election outcome had been brought about by the same familiar cosmological factors: clearly, I was told, the former president’s secret occult knowledge—provided by the aforementioned relative—had carried the day and put his chosen heir into office. But the newly elected president’s public perception changed with a single, unexpected political move. Voted into office on a UDF party ticket, Bingu wa Mutharika surprisingly founded his own party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in early 2005, severing ties with his former chairman Muluzi and forming a minority government. With growing numbers of MPs joining the newly established DPP, the president soon gained recognition as a reformer of the deeply entrenched and partisan political landscape. Along with these newfound credentials, the qualities of his leadership also took a cosmological spin. In March 2005, national and international news reports applauded the new president’s moral and spiritual fibre when he re-conquered the allegedly haunted New State House (now Kamuzu Palace) in Lilongwe, expelling the—quite literal—old ghosts that both of his predecessors had shunned by moving the presidential residence to Sanjika Palace in Blantyre, 300 km south of the capital (see BBC 2005). With the help of high-ranking clergy from different Christian congregations, newspapers detailed, Mutharika managed to dispel the evil spirits (ziwanda) which had caused the presidential palace to stand empty ever since its completion in the 1970s.7 Church leaders were 7  Most people I talked to argued that New State House had been erected on the site of a notoriously spirit-ridden meeting place (dambwe) of the nyau secret society that is specific to Chewa communities. Many of my Malawian friends further insisted that Blantyre’s Sanjika Palace was equally infested, with some explaining that its spirits were the souls of living persons removed from their bodies—through kukhwima rituals (see below) employed by Kamuzu Banda himself—in order to create spirit slaves (ndondocha) acting as invisible security guards and secret government informers (see Steinforth 2013). Others professed knowl-

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

91

quoted as praising a president who, “unlike Kamuzu and Muluzi, does not believe in charms. He believes in the power of prayer” (LaFraniere 2005).8 The political opposition—especially the unexpectedly ousted UDF— seemed powerless to counter the sudden fame of their renegade candidate. As if to illustrate their political plight at the time, a leading party member made unwelcome headlines in 2006 for being arrested while trying to procure secret ritual support from a local ‘witchdoctor’ on a graveyard at night (see below). In Mutharika, it seemed, Malawi had now found its rightful, righteous leader. And Malawi’s notoriously battered economy seemed to be on the mend. From the perspective of political analysts, Mutharika’s background as a former UN and World Bank expert in finance and trade helped to stabilize the national economy (see Ntata 2012). But his political accomplishments directly translated into a more religious idiom. Within months, a nationally successful pop hit celebrated the president as ‘Modern-Day Moses’ (Mose wa lero), crediting him with bringing abundant rainfalls to the country and, by divine appointment, leading his people to a promised land of prosperity and freedom (Ntata 2012, p. 83). The song ran incessantly on local radio stations, and the president quickly utilized its popularity by adopting it as the opening theme for his political rallies. When it came to the run-up to the 2009 presidential elections, Mutharika’s former mentor and UDF party leader Muluzi ended up putting his political weight—and, as many argued, his cosmological might— behind a third-party candidate: John Tembo, former acolyte of Kamuzu Banda and new leader of the MCP. But when Election Day came, the incumbent Bingu wa Mutharika, still credited by many with the near-­ divine attributes of a ‘Modern-Day Moses’, won in a landslide victory. One of my more triumphant Malawian counterparts, a Christian NGO edge that the palace in Blantyre was also haunted by the spirit of Aaron Gadama, a notable Malawian politician and outspoken opponent to Banda’s authoritative regime who, despite having been considered as under strong ritual (i.e. kukhwima) protection himself, had died in a politically convenient car accident in 1983 (see Van Donge 1998). 8  Notably, many of my Malawian counterparts expressed their approval of Mutharika’s heroic initiative even when the government publicly denounced these accounts and detained two Malawian journalists who had reported the story (see BBC 2005; Ntata 2012, pp. 72–74). For presidents, I was told, it was essential to subdue public rumours that could negatively reflect on their international reputation—a necessity that seemed to outweigh other concerns such as possible infringements on the freedom of the press or, indeed, on truth itself.

92 

A. S. STEINFORTH

administrator with Ngoni background living in Mangochi District, insisted that “God made him win,” that no-one—including, apparently, the forces of heaven itself—could stomach “going back to the Satanism” of pre-­ Mutharika politics. And many offered a cosmological explanation for the opposition’s electoral defeat: the election, they stated, had been preceded by the unexpected passing of the former president’s long-term occult expert and family relative. Without this essential source of secret ritual knowledge, I was told, Muluzi had been unable to secure electoral success for his chosen candidate Tembo the way he had five years previously. Mutharika’s re-election not only instilled many Malawians with a newfound confidence in a more prosperous future, it also inspired religious rhetoric of Malawi as an altogether new and godlier country. Soon after the beginning of Bingu wa Mutharika’s second term, the National Assembly was hotly debating a motion proposing an amendment to the national constitution to legally reframe the country as a “God-fearing nation” (see Epprecht 2012, p. 515). Some of my Malawian counterparts seemed ecstatic at the prospect of living in a nation officially defined in morally unambiguous terms, envisioning a collective future of divinely ordained righteousness and harmony.9 After extended constitutional debate, however, the proposal was repealed on the grounds that the secular foundations of its constitution do not accommodate Malawi redefining itself in religious terms. While my Malawian friends now expressed their frustration about such petty, legalistic complications, blaming the ungodly ritual activities of individual lawmakers themselves as hidden reasons behind their decision, popular debates on the place of the divine within 9  This utopian narrative of demonstratively establishing a ‘new, better Malawi’ was also expressed in a sudden change to the national flag, adopted upon President Mutharika’s personal initiative in July 2010, which replaced the 1964 flag’s central emblem of the red rising sun (on black band, with red and green bands below) by a white fully-risen sun (on black band, with red above and green below). Despite the political climate at the time, this piece of politics by symbolism (rising sun as dawn of freedom, as kwacha or new beginning versus risen sun as progress made and glory achieved) did not find public approval. Many Malawians argued that changes to the flag would incur unnecessary expenses at a time when government resources were needed to ensure food security. Others expressed their dislike of the idea of discontinuity, of the country changing its (symbolic) identity. One person jokingly told me that the white sun on a black field adorning ‘Bingu’s Flag’ more accurately resembles a moon, thus upending the flag’s core symbolic content—while another lamented that, rather than more burning sun, Malawi needed clouds and rainfall. Eventually, the original Independence Flag was quietly reinstated during the presidency of Joyce Banda, Mutharika’s successor, in 2012.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

93

the public sphere had reached a new high, and the president had, almost through no fault of his own, acted as a catalyst for its rise. But public discourse on Bingu wa Mutharika’s presidency shifted again during his second term. According to political analysts’ interpretations, his DPP’s comfortable two-thirds majority in the National Assembly no longer required him to aim for non-partisan consensus and political compromise. The president’s leadership style was perceived as increasingly aloof, hard-handed, and authoritarian (see Meinhardt 2020; Ntata 2012), triggering widely mediated concerns of the country ‘reverting to dictatorship’ (Sevenzo 2011). At the same time, Mutharika himself started comparing his presidential decisions to acts of God or other biblical figures in public statements (Malawi Voice 2011). Gasoline and foreign currency became scarce commodities in the country, and economic difficulty, drought, and crop failures were exacerbated by diplomatic crisis when the president alienated one of the country’s most vital international donors, the United Kingdom (The Guardian 2011). In the view of many Malawians, the change in the political climate demonstrated that Mutharika had, in the end, relapsed to the secret occult practices of his predecessors. While the president may not himself be involved in kukhwima practices and similar acts, I was told, he must have willingly ceded power to those among his advisers who certainly were. Malawian news sources reprinted open letters from national NGOs asking the president to “reject Satan [and] follow Christ” (Njewa 2012) while Joseph Nkasa, the musician who had composed the praise song on the nation’s ‘Modern-Day Moses’, publicly apologized for writing the song that now was a “thorn in the flesh of most Malawians” (Kakande 2012). When Bingu wa Mutharika unexpectedly died in office in April 2012, his death—officially attributed to cardiac arrest—gave rise to a wide range of rumours about political assassination and occult machinations. For some, the president’s death was part of a divine plan already prophesized by the Nigerian ‘Prophet’ T.B. Joshua— while others considered this prediction as evidence for the popular evangelist’s involvement in an international ‘death plot’ against the Malawian leader (Malawi Voice 2012).10 Public outrage, however, failed to ensue:

10  According to Malawian and other African news media, a leading member of Mutharika’s DPP had made a last-minute effort to avert the danger to the president’s life predicted in T.B. Joshua’s prophecy by sacrificing three goats in the presence of a Muslim sheikh (Chikoko 2012)—obviously, to no avail.

94 

A. S. STEINFORTH

the former messianic president had, in the view of some political commentators, become “the most hated man in Malawi” (Ntata 2012). In May 2014, Arthur Peter Mutharika—the younger brother of the one-time Modern-Day Moses—was elected President of Malawi (in office 2014 to 2020), ending the short and regrettably scandal-ridden interregnum of Bingu’s erstwhile Vice President Joyce Banda (in office 2012 to 2014).11 Being hailed by many as the candidate destined to revive the legacy of his brother’s earlier years, public discourse tried to integrate the former law professor and cabinet minister into the extant cosmological logic of his office long before his eventual electoral success. In July 2013, national news outlets already reported that, during a DPP rally, the new party leader had been christened Yoswa wa lero (i.e. ‘modern-day Joshua’) who, “just as Moses before him, […] has all it takes to lead Malawians through to the promised land” (Malawi Voice 2013a). Even Joseph Nkasa, the local musician who had renounced his praise of Mutharika’s late fraternal predecessor, soon chimed in, using the new president’s biblical honorific as the nation’s ‘Yoswa’ for another musical endorsement (Kondowe 2017). In the end, the moniker did not stick so well this time. But the idea of cosmological leadership, of democratically elected office bolstered by divine grace, had seamlessly been transferred along kinship lines. In early 2020, I am sitting in the bare brick consultation room of a village headman in rural Zomba District, drying off after a torrential rainfall that hit me during the long walk to his fortunately metal-roofed domicile. Reflecting on the nature of power (mphamvu), the short and wiry 50-year-­ old Yao chief explains that, in his view, any power is granted by the government. A chief such as himself, he continues, could be elevated to the higher office of Group Village Head (or grupu) at the discretion of a government official who, just as easily, could dispose him and his royal matrilineage from the throne altogether. His own superordinate chief, he recalls, has recently been promoted from the rank of Sub-Traditional Authority to a full Traditional Authority (TA) by order of the president, a move that not only significantly increased his status and competences but 11  Despite her short reign, even Joyce Banda was awarded the dubious honour of being included in the religiously fuelled rhetoric of Malawian politics. When she ran for re-election in 2014, a senior government official reportedly praised her for providing abundant rainfalls to the notoriously food-insecure country. Accordingly, said official deduced, “only witches and wizards […] will not vote for you in 2014” (Malawi Voice 2013b). Eventually, election results would come to suggest otherwise.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

95

also his access to government subsidies.12 Accordingly, the chief deduces, power lies in the hands of government first and foremost, but it also rests in the family and the individual capacities of the person. As a devout Muslim, he adds almost on second thought, he recognizes God (mulungu) as the ultimate source of power, but these capacities are no longer passed down to human beings the way they used to in the times of the Prophet. In the rural communities, he continues in a calm, meek voice, many people think of things like kukhwima when it comes to obtaining power. That is the way it has always been, he admits, but he declares himself uncertain what to think about it. By his own knowledge, most other chiefs in the area apparently undergo some kind of kukhwima ritual when taking office in order to be protected against witchcraft (ufiti) or other sorts of attacks and remain strong and healthy in spite of their public exposure. He quickly adds that he himself never sought out that kind of treatment: the best medicine cannot work without the blessing of God, he states more firmly now, and kukhwima could be part of the seductive powers of Satan after all. He considers himself protected by God due to his conscientious reading of “the Bible but also the Qur’an” (baibulo kapenanso kurani). When asked about his own inauguration as chief many years previously, he recalls that his TA at the time had sent some initiation experts (anamkungwi) who prepared a special meal for him to eat during the night before his public proclamation as chief.13 Somewhat hesitantly, he reckons that “if that was kukhwima then I must be a fortified person (wokhwima) myself, but no-one ever told me what this was about”. Yet while kukhwima practices have long played a role in the villages, he continues, its ever-increasing influence on national politics is of much greater concern. To him, a classic case in point is the well-known story of Sam Mpasu, a 12  The presidency of Bingu wa Mutharika saw a significant change in the governmental management of local systems of chieftaincy. Under the 1967 Chiefs Act, the historically important chieftaincies of Inkosi ya Makosi M’Mbelwa (of the Jere Ngoni), Inkosi ya Makosi Gomani (of the Maseko Ngoni), and Lundu (of the Mang’anja) had been installed as Paramount Chiefs in the 1960s. From 2007 onwards, the government started using the same legal provision to appoint selected senior TAs as Paramount Chiefs for many of the other larger ethnic groups—including Mweene wa Maamwene Mkhumba (of the Lomwe), Msyungu ya Ayao Chikowi (of the Yao), Kyungu (of the Ngonde), and Chikulamayembe (of the Tumbuka), establishing a level of ‘parallel rule’ (Eggen 2011) across much of Malawi. For more on Malawian systems of chieftaincy, see e.g. Chanock (1975), Chinsinga (2006), Chiweza (2007). 13  For a detailed account of the initiation of Yao chiefs, see Dicks (2011).

96 

A. S. STEINFORTH

senior politician who was arrested by police while trying to comply with the ritual instructions (zizimba) some local healer had given him. The mentioned case is one that I am already familiar with, a well-­ publicized and much-debated political scandal that occurred back in 2006. Mpasu, former Speaker of the House, Government Minister, and long-­ time Member of Parliament with alleged prospects for the highest office in the country, had been arrested in the middle of the night for trespassing on a rural graveyard. As I was told numerous times over the years, members of a rural community in Machinga District had been alarmed by an expensive vehicle parked close to their local cemetery at night and, investigating the matter, soon found themselves confronting this very prominent political figure. Renditions of the story vary as to whether the suspect politician, seeing himself surrounded by an irate crowd of villagers, claimed that he had only been ‘seeking traditional medicine’ or denied it, whether he indeed reported having a nocturnal graveyard meeting with a certain local healer (sing’anga) or whether he had merely ‘lost his way’ to a friend’s house (ANGOP 2006). Both vernacular accounts and media reports agree that Sam Mpasu was taken into custody by police officers arriving at the scene and later charged for trespassing. Regardless of the outcome of court proceedings, the former parliamentary heavyweight— now broadly associated with witchcraft—had already done serious damage not only to his own political career but also to the opposition platform of his UDF party and its leader, Bakili Muluzi. Eventually sentenced on (unrelated) charges of corruption in 2008, he spent years in prison and, after his release in 2014, retreated from public life up to his unexpected passing in 2018. No-one, the chief now continues, knows exactly why Sam Mpasu hired a sing’anga to help him gain access to secret sources of power that night— but everyone is aware that kukhwima instructions (zizimba) require a person to commit all kinds of unsavoury deeds, to be performed in secret on cemeteries or in similarly shunned locations. And different kinds of kukhwima rituals serve different specific goals, including protecting a person from the bullets of an attacker’s gun, winning over the crowds that attend one’s public rallies, influencing voters in a candidate’s favour, or even swinging a judge and jury to acquit an obviously guilty defendant. But Sam Mpasu, the headman now ponders, must have been detained before he could fulfil the zizimba he had received—and so his life went downhill afterwards, leading to loss of all political offices, conviction on multiple charges, prison time, and an untimely death under questionable

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

97

circumstances. That is how one can tell, he concludes, that these kinds of things must come from Satan: they appear uniquely promising and profitable while, in the end, invariably destroying the person who engages in them. 1.2  Traditions of Authority and the (a)Morality of Power After arduous preparations, I finally get the opportunity to meet with the local mfumu (pl. mafumu), a Traditional Authority (or TA) in Mangochi District. Due to the highly elevated status of mafumu within the hierarchical system of chieftaincy in Malawi, I first had to pass muster by meeting with Edson Kamangwana, the clerk (kalariki) acting as the chief’s government-­appointed councillor, secretary, and mediator. Now arriving at the mfumu’s hot and dusty doorstep on the appointed morning, I wait for the chief to return from the bwalo la milandu, the village court where he administers justice in  localized legal cases that do not fall under the immediate jurisdiction of the governmental Magistrate’s Court system.14 When he arrives, the mfumu, a portly Yao gentleman in his 50s wearing a flowing Muslim gown and plastic flipflops with a white dress shirt and grey suit pants, takes a careful look at my credentials and confirms the modalities of confidentiality before settling down in his chair, calling for his daughter to bring some water to drink, and beginning his reflections on the authority of chiefs. He attained his position as a mfumu by means of family succession. By his standards, chiefly authority is therefore best understood as something that lies in the blood and is inherited through kinship ties. Whenever a chief dies, he explains, it is up to their extended matrilineage to decide on the successor, and the only requirements for taking office are membership in the right matrilineal kinship group and being singled out as the most suitable candidate. Religion, in his view, only plays a role in the sense that any chief would want their people to obey the teachings they adhere to, and so he—as a Muslim—would always remind his people to honour the faith and fear God (mulungu). It is true, he confirms, that many mafumu use secret ritual practices in order to fortify themselves (kukhwima) against attacks by witchcraft (ufiti) or to become rich—but these practices, he claims, are neither particularly 14  For more information on the traditional court system and legal pluralism in Malawi, see von Benda-Beckmann (2007), Steinforth (2015).

98 

A. S. STEINFORTH

worrisome nor in any way characteristic of chieftaincy. Avoiding my question regarding the details of his own initiation ceremony, he observes that these kukhwima practices are increasingly used within the religious communities, with people trying to gain the coveted status of religious leaders by obscure ritual means—even though these acts often contradict the spirit of the very office they aspire to. The same happens in politics, he lectures: many well-known politicians start engaging in such occult practices prior to entering their political careers in order to obtain the much-­ needed financial resources to fuel their political campaigns, or to guard themselves and their assets from their many enemies. Protecting and strengthening oneself against others, he pronounces in a grave, stately tone, is a necessity among wielders of power anywhere in the world. Confronted with my protestation that secret defensive rituals are not considered part of political life in my home country, the mfumu expresses himself unconvinced, insisting that, here in Africa at the very least, things like witchcraft (ufiti), sorcery (matsenga), and kukhwima do indeed happen. Some of these practices are mostly public because they make the perpetrator rich or powerful which, after all, is not a bad thing. A much greater danger to the communities lies in the entirely secret deeds of afiti (i.e. witches) who are not after wealth or power but hurt and kill others out of pure malice or jealousy. Accordingly, he continues, pointing down the dusty village path towards the sheet metal roof that marks the meeting place of his weekly village court, he delegates any ufiti-related legal issues that reach his court directly to the police and the judicial responsibility of the local District Commissioner. Through this zero-tolerance policy towards witchcraft, he proudly proclaims, witches in his domain have learned to tread carefully to ensure that their evil machinations are never brought to his attention. As the guarantors of peace in the communities, he goes on, it is any mfumu’s duty to keep evildoers at bay for the benefit of all. Musa Namwera is a local Yao farmer and part-time schoolteacher in his late 20s. Sitting down in the shade by a busy dirt road close to a local trading centre in rural Mangochi District, he tells me about his paternal grandfather, a former chief in a nearby village. Due to his own family background, Musa claims, he is well familiar with the accounts of ufiti, kukhwima, or other ritual practices that are prominent in the community. Neither mafumu nor politicians, he stresses, can succeed in their elevated positions without fortifying themselves through kukhwima rituals. While some of these practices, Musa explains, are aimed at protecting oneself from ufiti

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

99

or other kinds of ritual attacks, others are used for becoming rich or powerful. In either case, anyone who wants to achieve such kinds of personal goals first has to secretly seek out a suitable ritual expert—usually a local healer (sing’anga)—who, for an often steep fee, would provide them with precise ritual instructions (zizimba) on how to attain them. Invariably, however, these prescriptions include acts that go ‘against humanity’, as he describes it,  violating basic tenets of morality and social order by, for example, requiring someone to have sexual intercourse with their mother or sister, to kill a child from their own matrilineage, or to dig up the body of a dead person in the graveyard and steal their remains. And anyone unable to follow their zizimba to the letter will invariably suffer dire personal consequences such as madness, rendering them forever incapable to betray the hidden ambitions they wanted to realize, the socially reprehensible means by which they hoped to achieve them, or the identity of the expert who provided the crucial ritual know-how. The same, he continues, usually plays a role in the installation of a new mfumu, only that chiefs have the ritual performed on them without having to follow instructions and seek out ingredients themselves. Local knowledge has it that, during the inauguration ceremony, the soon-to-be officeholder undergoes a secret induction into their future role. At midnight before the day of their public presentation, Musa reports, the mfumu-to-be is served a ceremonial meal of nsima (i.e. maize porridge, the local staple food) accompanied by different side-dishes (ndiwo), one of which would, unbeknownst to them, contain human meat (nyama za anthu). If the initiate ends up eating of this particular dish first or enjoying it more than the others, attendants would rejoice, taking this to indicate that the mfumu would be strong and powerful, capable of standing their ground—and, by extension, standing up for the community—even if human lives may be lost in the process. These measures, Musa explains, are part of the ritual process of fortifying (kukhwima) the chief against outside attacks and ascertaining that they will stop at nothing to defend their office. These, he emphasizes, are the qualities that are required most in a good and capable leader of the community. As I bring up a village chiefs’ responsibilities in fighting ufiti in the communities, Musa gives me an awkward smile before offering a rectification: according to common knowledge in his own village, it is in fact the duty of any mfumu to reign in and protect—rather than eradicate—the afiti secretly existing in their domain. He explains that, while afiti are indeed evil and intent on nothing but harming people, they also act as a

100 

A. S. STEINFORTH

useful deterrent against infringement from outside, meaning that any village known for their powerful witches is also a village no-one will dare to defy. From that perspective, Musa continues, the role of a chief is to constantly negotiate a compromise between the explicitly anti-social and immoral acts of ufiti and the upkeep of the social order in the community, shielding local afiti from prosecution as long as they do not cross the carefully circumscribed boundaries of tolerable social transgression. To be able to take on that task, any chief needs to be fortified—just like any politician or other public figure who may attract unwanted hostile attention. Most people in the rural communities, he continues, would immediately associate someone in a position of power with committing objectionable ritual acts against their fellow human beings in pursuing their own selfish ambitions. But then, Musa asks me, what is power other than someone’s individual goals being put above the interests of everyone else? 1.3  Charismatic Callings and (un)Holy Alliances After an extended trip along washed-out dirt roads in the rural backwaters of Mangochi District, I finally arrive at a very modest mud-and-thatch home that doubles as a healer’s shrine. Accompanied by her husband, Mayi Amina welcomes me in their front yard and invites me to settle down on a mat in the shade of a tarpaulin. After some preliminary pleasantries, Amina, a gaunt and soft-spoken Yao farmer in her 40s, agrees to tell me about her work as a sing’anga. Her ability to heal people from all kinds of illness comes directly from the spirits, she stresses, making her what is locally known as a sing’anga wa mizimu (i.e. spirit healer). Like many other Malawian asing’anga, her calling to take up this profession started with suffering: for many years in her youth, Mayi Amina continues, she had been struggling with debilitating headaches and stomach-ache, repeatedly failing to find help at governmental hospitals until she finally approached a sing’anga who, after putting his divinatory devices to work, attested that her aches and pains were caused by spirits (mizimu) tormenting her so she would become a healer herself. Once she had accepted the presence of these spirits in her life and found a way of communicating with them, she recollects, her complaints stopped immediately, and the spirits began providing her with information on how to treat the health problems of those entering her compound, allowing her to eventually establish the reputation of a capable spirit healer.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

101

Unlike many of her local counterparts who work under the spiritual guidance of long-deceased parents or grandparents, uncles or aunts, the two spirits at work in Amina’s life are more in line with her Muslim background,15 having identified themselves as the spirits of Issa (i.e. Jesus) and Ibrahimu (Abraham). These angelic spirits (mizimu ya angelo), as she calls them, are only there to help people—while ancestral spirits (mizimu ya makolo) may be benevolent one day and malicious the next, just like they were in life. Using the ‘traditional’ device of a mirror (galasi) alongside the bible to divine the instructions of her spirits, she says a lot of work for local asing’anga has to do with ufiti and kukhwima. In the former case, it is about using the spirits to find medications and counteract the charms used against a person while, in the latter, it is about using the spirits to find medications and achieve other personal goals. As a vessel of her angels, she emphasizes, she sends everyone back home who approaches her with kukhwima requests, deploring the fact that many of her professional colleagues encourage such practices by offering their arcane knowledge up for a price. Amina concedes that providing the zizimba instructions for a customer to get rich or powerful can earn a sing’anga large sums of money for entirely confidential services, stressing however that this is not what God (mulungu) and the angels want her to do. She seems to think for a moment before professing that doing kukhwima is not like doing the work of Satan, but simply about people being selfish and greedy. As for herself, she repeats, she only ever helps people in need and never charges more than the low fees that her spirits have set for her. At some point in our conversation, Mayi Amina has started belching repeatedly and, burping incessantly now, she finally asks her husband for a drink of water, sitting back and covering her eyes with a shaking  hand. Apologetically, her husband explains that she cannot talk for long and that it may be necessary to terminate the interview now. Looking rather glassy-­ eyed while eructing again and again, Mayi Amina makes no attempt to see me off but stays seated on the mat in front of her house while her husband ushers me across the yard towards the footpath that leads back to my car, explaining that “it has started” (zayambitsa). As I make my way through 15  Not unlike many Christian congregations in Malawi, common schools of Islam—such as practiced by large parts of the Yao community—recognize the existence of different kinds of spirit entities, including not only the ambivalent majini but also different kinds of angelic and demonic forces (see Steinforth 2009, pp. 78–90). For more information on the past and present of Yao Islam in Malawi, see e.g. Bone (2000), Dicks (2012), Mitchell (1956), Musa (2005), or Stannus (1919).

102 

A. S. STEINFORTH

the surrounding maize fields, I hear the voice of Mayi Amina behind me, uttering what sounds like heated demands and vociferous claims in an uncharacteristically loud and harsh tone. The healer’s spirits, it would appear, have come to have their say. Pastor Eliphas Banda agrees to meet with me at a small, scarcely frequented coffee shop in Mangochi boma, the capital of the district of the same name. An energetic man in his 30s sporting a stern-looking goatee and a well-tailored business suit, he invites me to sit down, visibly eager to start narrating his life story. Born into a devoutly Christian Lomwe family in the district of Mulanje, his life changed dramatically after being ‘born again’ in 1998. Graduating from Bible School some years later, he succeeded in becoming a pastor in his own right and began preaching in a local church. In 2004, as he recollects in a casual tone, he and two of his fellow pastors received a vision from God to “reach the unreached” and preach to the Muslim communities in the country. Now, as the ‘second in charge’ of their newly founded but ambitious Pentecostal church, he has posted himself in this Muslim-dominated district to proselytize among the local Yao population. Making no secret of his personal distaste for Islam, he explains in very urgent and serious terms how it is the mission of the growing Pentecostal communities to ‘make friends’ among local Muslims, pray for them, and eventually bring them into the fold. After all, he acknowledges with a shrug of his shoulders, “Jesus loves the Muslims too”. When it comes to politics, he insists while sipping on his bottle of Coca Cola, born-again believers like himself have the responsibility of remaining impartial while setting an example for the mighty to follow. Quite frequently, he explains with manifest pride, he and his fellow pastors manage to convert local politicians or influential entrepreneurs through prayer healing, opening them up to the ‘word of God’ in the process. If only more powerful people would abide by Pentecostal teachings, he muses, the whole country could be transformed into a haven of godly works. Much to his chagrin, however, Malawian politicians are all too often involved with demonic forces such as the charms they buy from local healers, old evils that have held the nation back for many decades now. The asing’anga out in the rural communities, he continues with obvious disdain, who are  luring ignorant villagers into their dens with promises of miraculous healing and unheard-of riches yet truly doing nothing but the devil’s work, must be finally rooted out. In his view, even those healers claiming to work with Jesus and the Saints only lead people astray, veiling their old demonic practices in a new, godly garb. To expose such false

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

103

prophets, his own mission relies on faith healing and exorcism “because Jesus has given us authority” to expel evil from this world. And, importantly, every person who accepts Jesus as their Lord and Saviour may receive this gift. The omnipotence of God may grant one person the gift of healing AIDS—while giving the power to cure cancer or, who knows, the strength to drive Satan out of politics to another. That way, he declares with fervour, people with different gifts will learn to depend on each other, creating a stronger community that is the “body of Christ”. The God-given power to heal is, however, an easy thing to lose again: anyone engaging in sinful acts will be stripped of their spiritual abilities, he explains, as they are not the property of any person, no gift you simply get to keep. Rather, these miraculous powers only demonstrate the divine presence within a true believer. It works, he elucidates with relish, like a cell phone: “if you have Jesus in you, he acts like a SIM card. Only through him can you connect to God. If you take it away, what remains is only a useless handset”. Accordingly, anyone who loses their gift because of immoral behaviour needs to repent and find forgiveness to “reconnect with God”. Miracles do happen, he clarifies, but they do not happen because one person is favoured by God. Instead, the gifted person is only the instrument of higher powers because “Our authority is not our own authority only, but we get it from Jesus. We call it delegated authority.” In the end, God chooses you with all your weaknesses, grooming you to act as His chosen vessel over time. Sometimes, Banda continues, God may even pick a person who, to those around them, seems like an unlikely choice to receive such a gift.

2   Weber in the Bush Almost 100 years ago, Marianne Weber posthumously published a collection of her late husband’s writings under the title ‘Economy and Society’ (or, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922). One of the volume’s core contributions to sociology and social sciences at large—and, arguably, one of Max Weber’s most lasting conceptual legacies—lies in his well-known typology of authority, defining such legitimate domination (i.e. legitime Herrschaft) as based on rational, traditional, or charismatic grounds (Weber 1978, p. 215). With Max Weber as one of the foundational contributors to discussions of power and authority in social sciences, it appears expedient to adopt his definitions in the present empirical context, using a

104 

A. S. STEINFORTH

classic model of classification that, despite its venerable age, requires remarkably little introduction today. 2.1  Theory: Analytic Traditions Virtual libraries have been filled with scholarly analyses, critical discussions, and empirical applications of Weber’s classification.16 Among them, his concept of charisma and charismatic authority “is probably the most widely used Weberian concept in anthropology” (Keyes 2002, p.  248). After initial specifications of the concept by Weber (1978, p. 216) himself—such as the routinization of charisma, hereditary charisma, or charisma of office—later generations of social scientists have significantly expanded on the original argument, elaborating on aspects including the dispersion (Shils 1965, 1958), manufacture (Glassman 1975), and revolutionary quality (Adair-Toteff 2005) of charisma; the charismatic gift (Coleman 2004), charismatic healing (Csordas 1994), and democharisma (Legesse 1994); distinctions between authoritarian and democratic charisma (Lloyd 2018), or processes of charisma’s allocation (Worsley 1968), its applicability to modern politics (Bensman and Givant 1975), its relationality (Wallis 1982), social construction (Joosse 2014), and character as social position rather than personal quality (Agamben 2005; Bourdieu 1991), to name but a few. Up to the present, anthropologists continue to employ charisma as a conceptual tool for a more theoretically grounded investigation of specific forms of religious organization across human societies (e.g. Feuchtwang 2010; Geertz 1983; Haynes 2017; Kirsch 2002; Lewis 1986; Lindholm 2013b, 2002, 1990; Werbner and Basu 1998). Other, especially sociological contributions have used the concept in order to launch quasi-religious analyses of ‘modern’ socio-political phenomena—including such diverse personages as Martin Luther King, Jr., Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler (Smith 2000), Kwame Nkrumah (Apter 16  It should be noted that Weber’s work on power (Macht) and domination (Herrschaft) “goes far beyond the three familiar types of authority” (Roth 1978, p. XC), including a confusing array of concepts such as military, judicial, governmental, domestic, manorial, and personal authority, political authority (Gewalt), legitimate authority (Herrschaftsgewalt), or self-appointed authority (Eigenvollmacht) (see Weber 1978). From the start, the translation of Weber’s terminology has been a challenge within Anglophone scholarship because, as Talcott Parsons (1964, p. 152) concedes, “the term Herrschaft has no satisfactory English equivalent”. Accordingly, different Weber translations—such as those by Parsons versus Edward Shils—variously render the term as either ‘domination’ or ‘authority’.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

105

1968), Charles Manson (Lindholm 2013a, 1990), Barack Obama (Whisker 2012), or Donald Trump (Lukes 2019). A comparatively understudied facet within the rich and flourishing scholarly debate on charisma that, however, is of interest here, is the challenge of morality implicit in the concept itself. Since its inception, academic definitions of charisma have tended to presuppose that, on the level of internal evaluation, any recognition of a person’s authority as charismatic validates their authority as normative, turning them into a “deified leader” and “beloved redeemer” (Lindholm 2013a, p. 1).17 Conceived of as the material vessel of supreme socio-cosmic order, any bearer of charisma arguably necessitates its cosmological ‘Other’ in order to justify its existence, meaning that binary coding—in terms of salvation narratives regarding cosmic struggles of good versus evil—“must be present in the forest of symbols surrounding each charismatic leader” (Smith 2000, p.  103). Charisma, from that perspective, implies a highly normative logic.18 In order to analytically refine this implication of charisma as morally ‘good’ by (emic) definition, David Aberle (1966) has suggested distinguishing this ‘positive’ from another, ‘negative charisma’, arguing that “a negatively valued [charismatic] figure may be described, metaphorically or literally, by those who oppose him [sic], in quasi-religious terms: as a living embodiment of the anti-Christ, devilish, the Devil himself [sic], or as a preternaturally clever, or diabolically clever, enemy” (Aberle 1966, p. 226). While scholarly responses to this conceptual expansion have been limited, some studies have indeed applied the notion of negative charisma in order to, for example, analyse witchcraft in Mexico (Turner 1970) or Islamophobia in the United States (Bilici 2012) while other recent contributions have refashioned it into concepts of ‘quasi-charisma’ (Green

17  Adherents’ perspective on bearers of charismatic authority as morally ‘good’ is based on their “devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, and exemplary character of [that] person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained” (Weber 1978, p. 215). 18  While it has been argued that Weber intends his concept of charisma as a “value-free term” (Aberle 1966, p. 226; see Keyes 2002, p. 247), this abstention of moral judgment crucially applies on the part of the analyst, that is, in a quasi-cultural relativist manner—and not on that of social actors. Rather, any judgment of a bearer of charisma “from any ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view” relies exclusively on “how the individual is actually regarded by those subject to charismatic authority, by his [sic] ‘followers’ and ‘disciples’” (Weber 1978, pp. 241–242).

106 

A. S. STEINFORTH

2008) or ‘anti-charisma’ (Whisker 2012) expressed, for instance, in New Christian Right discourses on U.S. President Barack Obama. Despite its considerable lifespan, Weber’s charisma still represents a mainstay in anthropological, sociological, and adjacent academic conversations. Gaining popularity long after its author’s passing, the concept continues to attract scholarly attention thanks to ongoing theoretical re-­ investigations and reconsiderations (Cabbuag 2016; Lloyd 2018; Turner 2003). 2.2  Application: Old Authorities in a New Field The ethnographic case studies presented earlier clearly display the analytic instrumentality of the Weberian canon of authority. Conspicuously, the organization of the separate ethnographic subsections already reflects the well-known ideal types, focusing on Malawian discourses regarding elected political office (i.e. legal authority), hereditary chieftaincy (traditional authority), and spiritual vocation (charismatic authority) in turn. The case studies also immediately underscore the challenges of an overly narrow application of these categories in a given empirical context, mirroring Weber’s own caveat that “none of these three ideal types […] is usually to be found in historical cases in ‘pure’ form” (Weber 1978, p. 216). In the first ethnographic subsection, the legal authority of elected political office comes with its own charismatic logic, documenting the local superimposition of ideas of a rational and bureaucratic basis of authority by strictly non-rational conceptions. Aberle’s notion of ‘negative charisma’ may be serviceable in analysing the prevalent association of elected leaders with practices such as ufiti (witchcraft) or usatana (Satanism). Malawian concepts of the ‘legality of enacted rules’ seem submerged in a fluid discursive stream current of cosmology, secrecy, and morality that spills into other typological categories (e.g. charismatic and traditional authority) and, as I elaborate below, charts the analytical shorelines of Weber’s typology altogether. The second subsection of the ethnography, nominally dedicated to Weber’s traditional authority, then shows how the  notion of authority passing along customary family lines of inheritance is in itself entangled in a legalistic logic: due to the superior political leverage granted to the national government, chieftaincy is not a realm of power independent of bureaucratic structures, facilitating emic logics of traditional authorities establishing their own networks of patronage and loyalty vis-à-vis elected

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

107

government officials. Local knowledge on the specific quality of chiefly authority is steeped in cosmological references that delaminate the multiple layers of contestation concerning the morality of an office-holder’s privileged social position, be it elected or inherited. The final ethnographic subsection, devoted to charismatic authority, presents two classic examples of ‘pure charisma’ in terms of “a ‘call’ in the most emphatic sense of the word, a ‘mission’ or a ‘spiritual duty’” (Weber 1978, p. 244). The actors’ claims for charismatic authority lie at the very core of their social function and recognition, tying them to cosmological sources of knowledge to fulfil their duties and, in turn, legitimizing their actions. The unforeseen invasion of spirits into the interview situation with the sing’anga may serve as a graphic illustration of the localization of power within the human-spirit transaction: angels, not persons, are the agents of miraculous deeds. Within the narrative of the Pentecostal preacher, the sing’anga’s claim for charismatic authority is transformed into ‘negative’ charisma, power received from counter-normative, evil sources. In both instances, the idea of proof for charismatic authority— which, by Weber’s reckoning, is “originally always a miracle” (1978, p. 242)—is prominently represented in the form of healing, and both narratives highlight the fragility of the ‘gift’ of authority: sinful behaviour (in the case of the Pentecostal pastor) or noncompliance with spirit demands (in that of the sing’anga) remove the coveted authority from the individual, leaving them “deserted by his [sic] god or his [sic] magical or heroic powers” (Weber 1978, p. 242). Charisma, in this context, is indicative not only of the successful maintenance of social relationships (see Wallis 1982) but indeed of socio-cosmological ones (see De Coppet 1990; Hardenberg 2017). In this spiritual playing field, claims of authority and its legitimacy are challenged by competing frames of cosmological reference, shifting discourses on the morality of specific ritual activities between cosmic binaries and alternative religious structures. A Weberian conceptual framework thus allows for the helpful analytical distinction of discrete reference systems within which local conceptions of authority are embedded, demonstrating intersections and delimitations surrounding alternative claims of the original source and true nature of, for example, a political officeholder’s authority. The limitations to its application, however, point out underlying conceptual struggles regarding the role of morality in the construction of legitimate domination, that is, authority.

108 

A. S. STEINFORTH

2.3  Critique: Moralities of Power So far, my analysis of the ethnographic data has circumnavigated the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’—not by design, but by virtue of the available conceptual tools. What remains to be clarified is how to analytically account for some of the more uncommon cosmological concepts featuring in the Malawian case studies, especially the recurring motif of ritual ‘fortification’ (i.e. kukhwima) that pervades all three ethnographic subsections. In Weber’s model, the place reserved for religious conceptions of authority, however broadly defined, is that of charisma. There are, however, several conceptual complications in identifying kukhwima as a form of charisma—complications regarding, first, its fundamental character as an exceptional quality, and second, its implicit normativity. I have already argued that the essential charismatic logic of a ‘divine gift’ is best applied to the Malawian data under investigation if understood in the concrete sense of socially validated socio-cosmological relationships. Cosmological sources of power are accessed and relationships maintained by means of personal acts of engaging with the cosmological sphere. While, in the case of priesthood or using’anga (so-called traditional medicine), the person is chosen by a cosmological entity with whom long-term exchange relationships are established, the benefits of kukhwima rituals are freely accessible to anyone willing and able to pay the price—both in literal, material terms and in the figurative sense of the personal sacrifices they entail. Crucially, any persons using ritual ‘fortification’ do not themselves generate lasting relationships with cosmological forces—it is their spiritual ‘service providers’, the asing’anga or other ritual experts, who do so.19 From that perspective, the authority associated with a person believed to be ‘fortified’ (wokhwima) is not exceptional in any metaphysical sense but strictly in terms of economic resources and unscrupulous dedication to a personal goal. When applied in this empirical context, the idea of a ‘divine gift’ is reduced to an act equivalent with purchasing a powerful, socially sanctioned—but not quite illegal—weapon for a specific personal 19  The only indication resembling an ongoing exchange relationship between a given ‘fortified person’ (wohkwima) and the cosmological sources of their authority may be seen in behavioural rules they are reported to follow, e.g. no longer eating certain kinds of food, not owning specific luxury goods, etc. Such restrictions are typically part of the instructions (zizimba) received from the ritual expert. Accordingly, it may be reasonable to argue that the socio-cosmological relationships inherent in kukhwima rituals do, at best, take the form of proxy relationships.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

109

use, arguably rendering the potential gained from such a transaction more functional than exceptional in character. Moreover, any understanding of charisma as grounded in ‘exemplary qualities’ collapses on the issue of its implicitly normative character—if viewed from an emic perspective. While none of my Malawian counterparts ever describe the power one derives from kukhwima rituals as morally ‘good’ (and while some, as illustrated above, condemn it as ‘evil’), most respondents insist that moral considerations do not play into it at all. Not unlike using’anga, kukhwima is mostly thought of in ambivalent, non-moralistic terms. They are neither good nor evil, neither fully legitimate nor entirely illegitimate but, instead, rather pragmatic realities located in the moral ‘grey zone’ of social life—therefore also precluding notions of ‘negative’ or ‘anti-charisma’ from being gainfully applied. Binary models juxtaposing normative and counter-normative cosmological moral categories, akin to ‘white’ against ‘black’ magic, fail to address the profound ambiguity expressed in the Malawian data. The question whether morality must be considered universal (see Csordas 2013) seems to be answered in the negative by Malawian discourses that identify outwardly immoral acts (e.g. the socially reprehensible idea of eating human flesh) as prerequisite for the role of a protector of the community—who, in turn, is also charged with defending society’s most destructive, even antithetical forces (i.e. ufiti). To hold power within society, it appears, is to step outside of its fundamental normative order. This, in my analysis, deeply rooted conception underlying Malawian discourses of power is only challenged by more recent Christian and Muslim ideologies maintaining exactly the kind of cosmic-cum-moral binaries that Weber himself had in mind. Shrouded in a ‘world of secrecy’ (Van Dijk 2000), power (mphamvu) remains an ambivalent, dangerous, and potentially destructive force even in its most socially accepted—and, in that sense, legitimate—aspect. Clearly, then, questions concerning the (il)legitimacy of the various Malawian cosmological notions are central to this discussion,20 both on the level of external evaluation and on the grassroots level of social actors 20  Max Weber (1978, pp.  36–38) supplies four different mechanisms of ascribing legitimacy to social order, these being tradition (i.e. sacredness of status quo), affectual faith (change sanctioned by prophetic revelation), value-rational faith (logically deduced propositions of ‘natural law’), and legality (either voluntary or imposed). For the sake of the present analysis, none of these categories seems to fit the requirements of the empirical data.

110 

A. S. STEINFORTH

themselves. From an outside perspective, any personal benefit allegedly reaped from kukhwima rituals hardly appears legitimate. Yet if the criterion of legitimacy, as core prerequisite of Weber’s concept of authority as ‘legitimate domination’, were to be rendered moot, the present analysis would no longer be addressing issues of authority in the Weberian sense but, instead, of mere power (Macht). Brian Morris (2014, pp. 110–111) resolves this apparent dilemma by re-emphasizing that legitimacy includes ‘tacit acquiescence’ of power as well as its unconditional acceptance (see Barclay 1996, p. 12; Barrett 2002, p. 68). From that vantage point, the Malawian vignettes above still fall under the analytical scope of authority—sharpening the focus on the moral underpinnings that change from case to case and from one actor’s perspective to another. The moral landscapes mapped out in the ethnography are far from monolithic or, in fact, uniform. While the—cosmological—sources of a given person’s presumed power feature as a frequent issue of debate, contestation, and negotiation, its de facto existence is hardly ever questioned. In other words: popular consensus may widely accept an individual’s cosmologically grounded authority even though its exact sources—and, therefore, the “moral dimension of legitimacy” (Williams 2010, p. 21)— are subject to intense public scrutiny. If Malawi’s chameleon politics account for the fact that “heroes of yesterday may be villains today, depending on the dynamic of political friendship and animosity” (Englund 2002, p. 17), then these ongoing transformations of external tinge are paralleled by ongoing re-interpretations of the ‘true colours’ of internal substance that constitute the cosmological foundation of a powerholder’s position. Social discourse navigates a multi-dimensional cosmological field that, with the marked exception of more recent schools in both Christianity and Islam, bypasses absolute moral judgments. Instead, society recognizes any kind of power and/or authority (mphamvu) as inherently ambivalent, positioning it outside of the moral order that otherwise organizes social interactions. Weber’s conceptual toolbox therefore requires some crucial analytical expansion in order to become serviceable for dismantling the entangled dynamics of power and authority in Malawi. The—arguably Judeo-­ Christian—cosmic binary that implicitly informs his idea of legitimacy obfuscates the much more pragmatic, much less moralistic empirical reality. Max Weber’s macro-perspective on large-scale social structures of domination thought of as internally stable entities (and his subsequent emphasis on a presumed homogeneity within social units rather than contestation, plurality, fluidity, and heterogeneity) puts a wide range of

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

111

micro-level social realities—and particularly ‘non-rational’, cosmological phenomena—out of focus of his purview. His “continued interest in the rise of Western rationality” (Adair-Toteff 2005, p. 189) and his “next to no use of ethnographic (or proto-ethnographic) materials” (Keyes 2002, p. 234) confine allegedly irrational notions of cosmology to the far corners of the social realm where, by the “revolutionary nature of charisma” (Weber 1978, p.  1115), they lurk as inherent threats to the established social order itself. In Malawi at least, such cosmological concepts command a much more central position in local epistemologies of power.

3   Malawian and Global Authorities In their recent collaborative collection On Kings, David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins prelude their discussion by asserting that “there are no secular authorities: human power is spiritual power – however pragmatically it is achieved” (2017, p. 3). The paradigm this statement reflects— addressed as the ‘desecularization of the world’ (Berger 1999), the ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere (Asad 2003), or a ‘post-secular society’ (Habermas 2008)—must be read as a radical critique of classical modernization theory and its secularist postulate of religion gradually disappearing from the public sphere in modernizing global societies. Empirical research in Africa and elsewhere, however, suggests that religion never went anywhere, but that modernist Eurocentric ideologies temporarily succeeded in banishing it to the allegedly non-modern, ir-rational, un-­ developed peripheries of a world otherwise conceived of as modern, rational, and developed at its presumed yet elusive centre (see Meier et  al. 2013, p. 21). Over many decades, “much anthropological work has been influenced directly or indirectly by the work of Max Weber” (Keyes 2002, p. 233). Applying such a Weberian lens in the analysis of Malawian ethnographic data, I have tried to demonstrate both the accomplishments of his well-­ known conceptual model and the challenges it faces in a post-colonial, post-modern, post-secular twenty-first century. By removing the partially implied, partially explicit social evolutionist blinders of Weber’s typology—that constantly juxtaposes allegedly ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ social structures, ‘irrational’ (i.e. religious) and ‘rational’ (secular) realities—the focus of analysis zooms out to reveal an expanded vista of power and legitimacy that transcends far beyond the well-mapped realms of politics and economy. The fruitful application of Weber’s notion of charisma to

112 

A. S. STEINFORTH

examine, for example, North American political phenomena has already charted the territory for further de-exoticizing the presence of essentially religious ideas in fundamentally modern scenarios, thus ‘re-enchanting’ (Jenkins 2000) a not-so-rationalized global modernity. The field data presented here suggest that Malawian conceptions of authority are contingent on the local systems of reference that activate and—in the sense of both moral justification and tacit acquiescence as discussed above—legitimize them. Applied on this ethnographic setting, the Weberian concept of authority becomes virtually indistinguishable from power—with the one discriminating criterion between the two, legitimacy, featuring as a permanent stone of social contention. With ‘legitimate authority’ merely resembling a shared recognition of elevated social status and the potentialities associated with it—and alternatively classified in moral, immoral, or decidedly amoral terms—the Malawian case study therefore presents a narrative of power outside of absolute cosmic struggles of good versus evil, of a benevolent ‘power of the people’ pitted against the oppressive forces of a politically and/or spiritually predefined nemesis. If comparative perspectives on authority still find their heuristic focal point in the Weberian vicinity of power-cum-legitimacy, then the current case challenges any attempt of a clear analytical distinction between power and authority. Instead, the fact that allocated power derives its legitimacy from specific—and constantly contested, competing, and conflicting— strategies that tie it into the fabric of social as well as socio-cosmological relationships suggests its conceptual proximity to Foucauldian ideas of power/knowledge (Foucault 1980) and relational understandings of power as a “complex strategical situation in a particular society” (Foucault 1978, p. 93). By Michel Foucault’s definition, power then represents “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization” (1978, p. 92) as well as subsequent processes of transformation, systems of mutual support (or contradiction) between force relations, and strategies that institutionalize social hegemonies. Larger social structures, institutions, and offices identified as ideal-typical domains of power may, in that sense, not necessarily be considered as the forces that bestow this peculiar quality on a given person. It may be argued that power—in terms of the cosmological support exemplified in the ethnography—is more often considered as a prerequisite to acquiring socially sanctioned positions of authority in Malawi than as its intended consequence.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

113

The Malawian case presented here stresses the importance of continued efforts of addressing the complex cultural configurations of morality and the legitimization of power relationships. It re-emphasizes that anthropological analyses, both in African contexts and beyond, benefit greatly from investigating power not as a universally applicable analytical category but, instead, in terms of its emic conceptualization, as an interpretation of social reality, and as a theory of knowledge. Such an exploration of power as allocated meaning bears the potential of overcoming onerous categorical limitations, of de-colonizing African alongside European and North American conceptions of the world—and, by implication, of itself and its Other.

References Aberle, David F. (1966). Religio-Magical Phenomena and Power, Prediction, and Control. In: Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 22 (3), pp. 221–230. Adair-Toteff, Christopher (2005). Max Weber’s Charisma. In: Journal of Classical Sociology, 5 (2), pp. 189–204. Agamben, Giorgio (2005). State of Exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Anders, Gerhard (2009). Like Chameleons: Civil Servants and Corruption in Malawi. In: Blundo, Giorgio / Le Meur, Pierre-Yves (Eds.), The Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations of Public and Collective Services. Leiden: Brill, pp. 119–141. ANGOP (2006). Police Arrest Malawi Opposition Leader for Trespassing. ANGOP: Agencia Angola Press. Retrieved from www.portalangop.co.ao. Apter, David E. (1968). Nkrumah, Charisma, and the Coup. In: Daedalus, 97 (3), pp. 757–792. Asad, Talal (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: University of California Press. Ashforth, Adam (2014). When the Vampires Come for You: A True Story of Ordinary Horror. In: Social Research, 81 (4), pp. 851–882. Barclay, Harold (1996). People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchism. (First published in 1982). London: Kahn and Averill. Barrett, Stanley R. (2002). Culture Meets Power. Westport, CN: Praeger. BBC (2005). Malawi ‘Haunted Palace’ Arrests. BBC News. Retrieved from www. news.bbc.co.uk. Benda-Beckmann, Franz von (2007). Legal Pluralism in Malawi: Historical Development 1858–1970 and Emerging Issues. Zomba: Kachere Series. Bensman, Joseph / Givant, Michael (1975). Charisma and Modernity: The Use and Abuse of a Concept. In: Social Research, 42 (4), pp. 570–614.

114 

A. S. STEINFORTH

Berger, Peter L. (Ed.) (1999). The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Bilici, Mucahit (2012). Finding Mecca in America: How Islam Is Becoming an American Religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Boeder, Robert B. (1984). Silent Majority: A History of the Lomwe in Malawi. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa. Bone, David S. (Ed.) (2000). Malawi’s Muslims: Historical Perspectives. Blantyre: CLAIM. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cabbuag, Samuel I. (2016). Charisma and Charismatic Leaders: Weber and Beyond. In: Philippine Sociological Review, 64 (1), pp. 209–230. Cammack, Diana / Kelsall, Tim (2011). Neo-Patrimonialism, Institutions and Economic Growth: The Case of Malawi, 1964–2009. In: IDS Bulletin, 42 (2), pp. 88–96. Chanock, Martin L. (1975). Ambiguities in the Malawian Political Tradition. In: African Affairs, 74 (296), pp. 326–346. Chikoko, Rex (2012). Malawi: Minister Kills Goats to Save President’s Life. AllAfrica. Retrieved from www.allafrica.com. Chinsinga, Blessings (2006). The Interface between Tradition and Modernity: The Struggle for Political Space at the Local Level in Malawi. In: Civilisations, 54, pp. 255–274. Chiweza, Asiyati L. (2007). The Ambivalent Role of Chiefs: Rural Decentralization Initiatives in Malawi. In: Buur, Lars / Kyed, Helene M. (Eds.), State Recognition and Democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Dawn for Traditional Authorities? New York, NY: Macmillan, pp. 53–78. Coleman, Simon (2004). The Charismatic Gift. In: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10 (2), pp. 421–442. Csordas, Thomas J. (2013). Morality as a Cultural System? In: Current Anthropology, 54 (5), pp. 523–546. Csordas, Thomas J. (1994). The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. De Coppet, Daniel (1990). The Society as an Ultimate Value and the Socio-­ Cosmic Configuration. In: Ethnos, 55 (3–4), pp. 141–150. Dicks, Ian D. (2012). An African Worldview: The Muslim Amacinga Yao of Southern Malawi. Zomba: Kachere Series. Dicks, Ian D. (2011). It Takes an Initiation to Make a Yawo Chief. In: Religion in Malawi, 16, pp. 3–11. Eggen, Øyvind (2011). Chiefs and Everyday Governance: Parallel State Organisations in Malawi. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 37 (2), pp. 313–331.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

115

Englund, Harri (2006). Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Englund, Harri (2002). Introduction: The Culture of Chameleon Politics. In: Englund, Harri (Ed.), A Democracy of Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New Malawi. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, pp. 11–24. Englund, Harri (1996). Between God and Kamuzu: The Transition to Multiparty Politics in Central Malawi. In: Werbner, Richard / Ranger, Terence O. (Eds.), Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London: Zed. pp. 107–135. Epprecht, Marc (2012). Religion and Same Sex Relations in Africa. In: Bongmba, Elias K. (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 515–528. Feuchtwang, Stephan (2010). The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts: Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory. New York, NY: De Gruyter. Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1978). The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1). New  York, NY: Pantheon Books. Geertz, Clifford (1983). Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York, NY: Basic Books. Glassman, Ronald (1975). Legitimacy and Manufactured Charisma. In: Social Research, 42 (3), pp. 615–636. Graeber, David / Sahlins, Marshall (2017). On Kings. Chicago, IL: Hau Books. Green, Jeffrey E. (2008). Max Weber and the Reinvention of Popular Power. In: Max Weber Studies, 8 (2), pp. 187–224. Habermas, Jürgen (2008). Secularism’s Crisis of Faith: Notes on Post-Secular Society. In: New Perspectives Quarterly, 25 (4), pp. 17–29. Hardenberg, Roland (2017). Introduction: The Study of Socio-Cosmic Fields. In: Hardenberg, Roland (Ed.), Approaching Ritual Economy: Socio-Cosmic Fields in Globalised Cultures. Tübingen: Universität Tübingen, pp. 7–35. Haynes, Naomi (2017). Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Jenkins, Richard (2000). Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium. In: Max Weber Studies, 1 (1), pp. 11–32. Joosse, Paul (2014). Becoming God: Max Weber and the Social Construction of Charisma. In: Journal of Classical Sociology, 14 (3), pp. 266–283. Kakande, Austin (2012). Nkasa Regrets Composing ‘Mose wa Lero’, Apologized to Malawians. Malawi Voice. Retrieved from www.malawivoice.com. Keyes, Charles F. (2002). Weber and Anthropology. In: Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, pp. 233–255. Kirsch, Thomas G. (2002). Performance and the Negotiation of Charismatic Authority in an African Indigenous Church in Zambia. In: Paideuma, 48, pp. 57–76.

116 

A. S. STEINFORTH

Kondowe, Russell (2017). Nkasa Praises APM, Crowns Him ‘Yoswa wa Lero’. Malawi24. Retrieved from www.malawi24.com. LaFraniere, Sharon (2005). A Ghost Story Turns Very Scary for Malawi Journalists. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com. Legesse, Asmarom (1994). Prophetism, Democharisma, and Social Change. In: Blakely, Thomas D. / Van Beek, Walter E. A. / Thompson, Dennis L. (Eds.), Religion in Africa: Experience & Expression. London: James Curry, pp. 315–341. Lewis, Ioan M. (1986). Religion in Context: Cults and Charisma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindholm, Charles (2013a). Introduction: Charisma in Theory and Practice. In: Lindholm, Charles (Ed.), The Anthropology of Religious Charisma: Ecstasies and Institutions. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–30. Lindholm, Charles (Ed.) (2013b). The Anthropology of Religious Charisma: Ecstasies and Institutions. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Lindholm, Charles (2002). Culture, Charisma, and Consciousness: The Case of the Rajneeshee. In: Ethos, 30 (4), pp. 357–375. Lindholm, Charles (1990). Charisma. Oxford: Blackwell. Lloyd, Vincent W. (2018). In Defense of Charisma. New  York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lukes, Steven (2019). Trump’s Charisma. In: Klinenberg, Eric / Zaloom, Caitlin / Marcus, Sharon (Eds.), Antidemocracy in America: Truth, Power, and the Republic at Risk. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 199–206. Lwanda, John L. (1993). Kamuzu Banda of Malawi: A Study in Promise, Power and Paralysis  – Malawi Under Dr Banda (1961 to 1993). Glasgow: Dudu Nsomba Publications. Malawi Voice (2013a). DPP Christens Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika: Now Call Him ‘Joshua wa Lero’. Malawi Voice. Retrieved from www.malawivoice.com. Malawi Voice (2013b). Sidik Mia Praises Joyce Banda for Good Rains: It’s Only Witches and Wizards That Will Not Vote for You in 2014. Malawi Voice. Retrieved from www.malawivoice.com. Malawi Voice (2012). TB Joshua Under Fire Over Bingu’s Death: From Bishops, Zanu-PF. Malawi Voice. Retrieved from www.malawivoice.com. Malawi Voice (2011). Bingu Goes Biblical on Joyce Banda’s Firing: Fault God First for Expelling Lucifer. Malawi Voice. Retrieved from www.malawivoice.com. Meier, Barbara / Igreja, Victor / Steinforth, Arne S. (2013). Power and Healing in African Politics: An Introduction. In: Meier, Barbara / Steinforth, Arne S. (Eds.), Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 15–36.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

117

Meinhardt, Heiko (2020). Malawi’s Rocky Route to Democratic Consolidation. In: Rompel, Matthias / Gronemeyer, Reimer (Eds.), Malawi: Economy, Society and Political Affairs. London: Zed, pp. 31–51. Mitchell, J. Clyde (1956). The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Morris, Brian (2014). Anthropology, Ecology, and Anarchism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Musa, Valiant K. (2005). The History of Islam in Malawi: Before and After Christianity to Modern Times. Blantyre: Fattani. Muula, Adamson S. / Chanika, Emmie T. (2005). Malawi’s Lost Decade: 1994–2004. Balaka: Montford Media. Muyebe, Stanislaus / Muyebe, Alexander (1999). The Religious Factor within the Body of Political Symbolism in Malawi, 1964–1994: A Bibliographical Essay. Parkland, FL: Universal Publishers. Njewa, Jones (2012). NGOs Ask Mutharika to ‘Reject’ Satan, Follow Christ. Malawi Democrat. Retrieved from www.malawidemocrat.com. Ntata, Z.  Allan (2012). Trappings of Power: Political Leadership in Africa. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse. Parsons, Talcott (Ed.) (1964). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. (First published in 1947). New York, NY: The Free Press of Glencoe. Phiri, Desmond D. (1999). Let Us Die for Africa: An African Perspective on the Life and Death of John Chilembwe of Nyasaland/Malawi. Blantyre: Central Africana. Power, Joey (2010). Political Culture and Nationalism in Malawi: Building Kwacha. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Rompel, Matthias (2020). Malawi Five Decades after Independence: Failed State or Latecomer? In: Rompel, Matthias / Gronemeyer, Reimer (Eds.), Malawi: Economy, Society and Political Affairs. London: Zed, pp. 11–30. Roth, Guenther (1978). Introduction. In: Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. xxxiii-cx. Sevenzo, Farai (2011). African Viewpoint: Is Malawi Reverting to Dictatorship? BBC News Africa. Retrieved from www.bbc.co.uk. Shepperson, George / Price, Thomas (2000). Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Nyasaland Rising of 1915. (First published in 1958). Blantyre: CLAIM. Shils, Edward (1965). Charisma, Order, Status. In: American Sociological Review, 30 (2), pp. 199–213. Shils, Edward (1958). The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma: Their Bearing on Economic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries. In: World Politics, 11 (1), pp. 1–19.

118 

A. S. STEINFORTH

Smith, Philip (2000). Culture and Charisma: Outline of a Theory. Acta Sociologica, 43 (2), pp. 101–111. Stannus, Hugh S. (1919). The Wayao of Nyasaland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Steinforth, Arne S. (2015). Between Shrine and Courtroom: Legal Pluralism, Witchcraft, and Spirit Agency in Southeastern Africa. In: Basu, Helene / Sax, William (Eds.), Law of Possession: Ritual, Healing, and the Secular State. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 55–81. Steinforth, Arne S. (2013). The Spirit in the Voting Booth: Democracy and Cosmology in Malawi. In: Meier, Barbara / Steinforth, Arne S. (Eds.), Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies. Frankfurt: Campus, pp. 135–155. Steinforth, Arne S. (2009). Troubled Minds: On the Cultural Construction of Mental Disorder and Normality in Southern Malawi. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. The Guardian (2011). Malawi Expels British Ambassador. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com. Thorold, Alan (2000). Regionalism, Tribalism and Multiparty Democracy: The Case of Malawi. In: South African Journal of International Affairs, 7 (2), pp. 135–139. Turner, Paul R. (1970). Witchcraft as Negative Charisma. In: Ethnology, 9 (4), pp. 366–372. Turner, Stephen (2003). Charisma Reconsidered. In: Journal of Classical Sociology, 3 (1), pp. 5–26. Van Dijk, Rijk (2001). Witchcraft and Scepticism by Proxy: Pentecostalism and Laughter in Urban Malawi. In: Moore, Henrietta L. / Sanders, Todd (Eds.), Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 97–117. Van Dijk, Rijk (2000). Secret Worlds, Democratization and Election Observation in Malawi. In: Abbink, Jon / Hesseling, Gerti (Eds.), Election Observation and Democratization in Africa. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 180–210. Van Donge, Jan K. (2002). Malawian Society and the Charismatic Heritage of Kamuzu Banda and Kamuzuism after 1993. Paper presented at the conference ‘Malawi after Banda’. Stirling, Scotland. Van Donge, Jan K. (1998). The Mwanza Trial as a Search for a Usable Malawian Political Past. In: African Affairs, 97 (386), pp. 91–118. Wallis, Roy (1982). The Social Construction of Charisma. In: Social Compass, 29 (1), pp. 25–39. Weber, Max (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. (First published in 1922). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Werbner, Pnina / Basu, Helene (Eds.) (1998). Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults. New  York, NY: Routledge.

  BY WHAT AUTHORITY? 

119

Whisker, Daniel (2012). Apocalyptic Rhetoric on the American Religious Right: Quasi-Charisma and Anti-Charisma. In: Max Weber Studies, 12 (2), pp. 159–184. Williams, J.  Michael (2010). Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Worsley, Peter (1968). The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia. (First published in 1957). London: Paladin. Wroe, Daniel (2020). Remembering Kamuzu: The Ambiguity of the Past in Malawi’s Central Region. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 46 (2), pp. 247–261.

Bittamo: Authority, Legitimacy, and Duty in Kara, Southern Ethiopia Felix Girke and Dunga Nakuwa Batum

1   Introduction1 One of the few academic publications that specifically addresses the question of ‘authority’ in the South Omo region of Ethiopia is Jon Abbink’s inquiry into “the elusive chief” (1999). While noting at the time the resurgent interest of “governments, NGOs and the developmental community” in African chiefs “to enhance legitimacy (‘democratisation’) and 1  Girke’s earlier fieldwork in  Ethiopia was  funded by the  University of  Mainz as  well as the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. Dunga’s participation was enabled by the University of Konstanz. We also want to thank the editors of this volume and  the  participants of  the  anthropological colloquium at  the  University of  Konstanz in the Summer Term of 2020, who offered very welcome feedback.

F. Girke (*) HTWG Konstanz - University of Applied Sciences, Konstanz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. N. Batum South Omo Zone Council, Standing Committee for Justice and Good Governance (Chair Person), Jinka, Ethiopia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_5

121

122 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

as mediums of social change in Africa” (1999, p. 49–50), he soon specifies his theoretical interest: […] to examine the nature of ‘authority’ in a non-state social formation and to highlight aspects of the transformation in patterns of local leadership in twentieth-century Ethiopia. There are several small-scale societies or social formations in this country that defy cherished models of political authority and chieftaincy. (Abbink 1999, p. 50, cf. 2005)

The twentieth century has good and well receded, but the small-scale societies he refers to are still there in South Omo, close to the border of Kenya and South Sudan. The structural tension he sets up remains acute as well: actors are seeking to instrumentalize and profit from the legitimacy enjoyed by putative chiefs, while the very nature of such chiefs remains uncertain as well as the ‘models’ one can apply to this configuration. This chapter picks up on this question of modelling of authority (and cognate terms such as power and legitimacy), but shifts the focus a little southeast from Suri, where Abbink has been working so productively over literal decades, to the place and people known as ‘Kara’ or ‘Karo’ in the region, a population of less than 2000 people today. Based on Girke’s fieldwork in Kara and Dunga’s autobiographical reflections on belonging to the lineage of the ritual leaders of Kara, this chapter complements established approaches to authority in (East) Africa with a granular discussion of bittamo. This Kara notion to us best allowed exploration of the semantic field of ‘authority’ in English, an exploration that ends up highlighting differences more than convergences or translations.2 Unconventionally, the chapter also addresses what it means, today, to maybe having to become a bitti, as the individual ritual leader is called in Kara, one day. Our findings return us to Abbink’s questions and concerns, as they also highlight how models of authority held by state actors fail to align with the Kara’s (and, arguably, all their neighbours’) understandings of the foundations of legitimacy. But there are not just conflicting claims of authority between ‘local chieftains’ and ‘the state’: much rather, there is a profound lack of agreement on how an individual must behave in order to be accorded authority. This chapter argues that while Kara know 2  A pertinent follow-up to this research would also explore this semantic field in the national language Amharic, in which most official meetings are held and which adult Kara as a rule know well.

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

123

that others elsewhere are willing to follow commands and subordinate their personal interests to those of (s)elect(ed) others, they, as a rule, do not: there is no stable local relation of public authority to which state efforts at strengthening legitimacy could easily attach itself. What we call the ‘duties’ of authority is central in this regard. One of our contributions to the—generally Weberian—discussions of authority within anthropology thus consists in the subjective perspective supplied by Dunga as somebody who is not yet a Kara ritual leader, but is expecting (and even more, expected) to become one in the future; the duties entailed will demand that he adapts his livelihood accordingly. Kara is just far enough away from the Suri that both have little immediate contact even today, but both belong to a broader regional network of entangled language groups, economic networks, cultural imaginaries and conflicts as well as more peaceful interactions, which have been studied by several cohorts of researchers since the 1960s. All these groups pursue a more or less agro-pastoralist livelihood and cultivate an egalitarian ethos; while specifics differ in places today, they remain in principle acephalous.3 This returns us to our introductory quotation: Abbink applies the adjective of “non-state” to these “social formations”, which we have been echoing here, despite the reasonable objection that there is no such thing: even in the brief two decades since the time of his writing, the Ethiopian state has encroached significantly on the region and effectively encapsulated the resident polities (see Girke 2018). But to still maintain this distinction reflects that the actors involved mostly hold and perpetuate the separation of ‘Kara’ and ‘the state’, and that the Kara—in spite of their encapsulation—have sought to protect and even insulate both spiritual and political functions from what they see as outside interference. This Kara view of the state fits well enough with Ferguson and Whitehead’s use of it “in a narrow sense—as the institutions of political control, the government” (2000, p.  6). We seek to update what Abbink observed and diagnosed and to glean from that effort a better understanding of not only the nature of legitimacy in southwestern Ethiopia, but also the ongoing

3  This egalitarian ethos is embedded in generally male-centred and gerontocratic institutions and practices. While personal autonomy and individualism are cherished as character traits also in women, they are granted much less participation in public space, debate and decision-making. In ritual beyond the domestic sphere, they are usually assigned ancillary roles.

124 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

transformation processes the beginnings of which he marked.4 We, too, want to discuss a transformation of leadership and authority: but it is not the office of the bitti in Kara that has changed so much, but the lives of those expected to one day hold it. This ties into the emergence of this chapter as a co-production, a matter that should not be confined to a footnote: Dunga Nakuwa Batum, who has a law degree and has for a long time collaborated with numerous researchers in the region, and Felix Girke decided to write this chapter together. We have known each other since 2003. For us to co-write in this manner seemed overdue: while many Kara have been cited in academic texts and have contributed fundamentally and comprehensively (and often enthusiastically) to research with and among them—Dunga was also the protagonist of a National Geographic feature (Shea 2010)—this is the first time a Kara gets to publish about their own history, politics and culture. Dunga’s contribution not only contrasts an ‘inside perspective’ with Girke’s anthropological analysis: in addition to interpreting Kara culture alongside Girke, he also offers autobiographical reflections that drive home the gravity of the challenge of being expected to hold traditional office.5 Below, we first sketch the larger question of national integration and policies in Ethiopia before going on to outline specific Kara conceptions and practice regarding authority, legitimacy and power.

2   Legitimacy in Ethiopia Historically, southwestern Ethiopia could for a long time be considered an illuminating instance of the tribal zone, conceptualized by Ferguson and Whitehead as

4  Abbink ends his text with suggesting that the question of how “local forms of authority and leadership” will be transformed in “scope, integrity and cultural valuation, [by the Ethiopian state ascendant] might set the agenda for future research” (1999, p. 71). While we focus on modelling the specific qualities of authority in the region, we will return to the question of the future towards the end of the chapter. 5  We considered different formats for the joint writing process, but due to the ongoing Corona pandemic at the time of writing and later nation-wide unrest in Ethiopia, we found ourselves unable to collaborate as closely and steadily as we had hoped. So while the discussion of bittamo below draws equally from Girke’s and Dunga’s observations and knowledge, the chapter gained its final shape through Girke’s more solitary writing process.

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

125

[t]hat area continuously affected by the proximity of a state, but not under state administration … Within the tribal zone, the wider consequence of the presence of the state is the radical transformation of extant sociopolitical formations, often resulting in ‘tribalization’, the genesis of new tribes. (2000, p. 3; cf. Abbink 1993)

This process of ethnic differentiation and the schismogenetic formation continues in its basic dynamics even today in sustaining the boundaries between ethnically marked polities—‘the tribal zone’ does denote a very real phenomenon (see Girke 2018). The intermittent warfare between the local resident populations attests to that as well (Gabbert 2012; Girke 2008). Contemporary scholarship has focused on both the tight-knit and complex interethnic relations of the region as well as the effects and modalities of state encapsulation (see e.g. Donham and James 1986): this latter discussion is increasingly informed by the ethnohistorical and very materialist approach most famously applied by James Scott (2009) to the shatter zones of the Southeast Asian highlands designated as ‘Zomia’.6 There, as here, more or less contemporary polities have been reacting to the state presence in how they conduct their livelihood and political organisation. And, similar to the highland peoples of Zomia, the inhabitants of southern Ethiopia (see Fig. 1) were not primarily reacting to the European empires, but to a regional expanding state. Located within the frontiers of Ethiopia—while, arguably, culturally rather more contiguous with the agro-pastoralist residents of northern Kenya and South Sudan—the ancestors of today’s Kara, Hamar, Nyangatom, Dassanech and so on were exempt from European colonialism. Abbink specifically emphasizes the “absence of a colonial legacy in politics and law” (1999, p. 51), something that both hinders and greatly informs efforts at comparison with other parts of Africa. So even if there was no ‘indirect rule’ in the strict sense, there were roughly analogous dynamics that some have identified as ‘internal colonialism’7: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Emperor Menelik managed to demarcate the boundaries of his realm vis-à-vis the British encroaching 6  See Girke (2016) for the comparison of the highland-lowland relations in Ethiopia on the one hand and southeast Asia on the other. Already Sigrist (1967) noted that there was some homology between the political dynamics described by Leach for the Kachin of northern Burma and the segmentary societies of East Africa. 7  See Mennasemay (1997) for the fine distinction between internal colonialism and internal oppression.

126 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

Fig. 1  Map of South Omo

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

127

from the South and the West, bringing firmly, formally and legally under his control numerous populations that had heretofore had little reason to identify with the polities of the Ethiopian highlands. The emergence of the tribal zone was the near inevitable result, as the highlanders had little capacity to ‘pacify’ these regions, and control was tenuous, conflict-ridden and tinged by disregard and discrimination of the encapsulated populations. One effect was that a close integration of the various autonomous polities of the region, which has been called the “cultural neighbourhood” (see Gabbert and Thubauville 2010), has remained intact until today. Girke’s research among the Kara since 2003 has accordingly focused on questions not only of national integration, that is, on centre-periphery relations, but also foregrounded the periphery-periphery relations. But even during the time of research, the situation in the Lower Omo Valley has radically changed: the revolution of the early 1990s that overthrew the self-styled ‘Marxist-Leninist’ military junta called the Derg (also Dergue) and brought to power the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), also paved the way to the eventual transformation of the country into a developmental state. Clapham has summarized this dynamic in clear terms, grounding it in the historical Ethiopian statehood of many centuries as an identifiable political unit, characterised by entrenched habits of authoritarianism on the one hand, and obedience on the other. Ethiopian statehood has certainly been problematic in many respects, notably its historical origins in the northern highland areas of the country, and often-brutal imposition on other areas of the present national territory. (2018, p. 1152)

In the face of this founding imposition, spread throughout the country by the soldier-settlers, the EPRDF shifted national policy to build on a model of ethnic federalism that granted degrees of representation to every “nation, nationality and people” in the country; as Clapham acerbically notes, “in emulation, even then, of the USSR” (Clapham 2018, p. 1154). After various stops and starts, the early 2000s saw the emergence of the new developmental paradigm, informed by the example of China and other East Asian countries: the state now sees its task as “providing the infrastructural conditions necessary for industrial development at the hands of private entrepreneurs” (Clapham 2018, p.  1155), while maintaining tight control over land. The attracted investment has afforded

128 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

opportunities to overhaul the country’s infrastructure and to pursue mega-projects such as hydroelectric dams, and to prioritize large-scale commercial agriculture in what it continues to regard—like its imperial and Derg predecessors—as essentially virgin lands in the south and west, demonstrating in the process a disregard characteristic of the Ethiopian state in all its manifestations for the livelihoods of pastoralists and shifting cultivators. (Clapham 2018, p. 1158)8

The most relevant take-away here is that over the last two decades, the Ethiopian lowlands have come into the focus of the state, where for a long time they were mostly regarded as inhospitable, disease-ridden and useless (Abbink 2012; Girke 2013; Turton 2011), and the governance also in South Omo has become much more hands-on, leading (more than anything else) to an increasing disenfranchisement of the formerly largely autonomous polities, who are year by year losing access opportunities to rangeland and fertile riverbanks, while suffering dismissive neglect in interaction, or revanchist persecution if daring to question or oppose the developmental state. The situation, thus, presents itself quite differently from Abbink’s initial portrayal, but the desire of state bodies and representatives to pursue some sort of legitimisation and public displays confirming their aspirations to authority continues—even if, prima facie, the lack of legitimacy of state rule in the eyes of the Kara appears as evident. But there are ambivalences, as Girke discovered in his research—the relation of the Kara towards those whom they identify as state representatives was not reliably marked by sullen refusal or spirited resistance but bore traces of solidarity expressed through irony (see Girke 2015). But even as the emblems of the state were at times embraced and are celebrated often enough, as when Ethiopian flags are waved even in ritual celebrations, the authority of individuals remains another matter, as those representing the state are still an Other.9

 See also Gabbert et al. (2021) for a broad overview.  Sensitive enough to disclaim any linear developments in terms of social organisation, Sigrist (1967, p. 18) noted that the study of segmentary societies afforded not only insights into the “acephalous stadium”, but also the “endogenous as well as exogenous emergence of rule.” The case of Kara and southwestern Ethiopia in general demonstrates that these processes are still playing out today. 8 9

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

129

Today it is assumed that even where indigenous socio-political structures still exist to a degree, that we will find what Sklar called “mixed government”, meaning that […] it is normal for traditional political jurisdictions to occupy a second dimension of political space—a dimension that lies behind the sovereign space. […] The officials of these ‘second states’ are known as traditional authorities; they hold positions of public trust in accordance with customary rules, although their appointments and functions are normally regulated by statutory law as well. (Sklar 2005, p. 16)

There is a lot to unpack here, and not all of it can be comprehensively discussed in this chapter: but it is worthwhile highlighting that the narrowing of traditional authorities to ‘jurisdictions’ is doubtful; the holding of trust must be considered an idealist aspiration rather than as a priori given; customary rules often aren’t customary (see Beyer 2016; Bohannan 1965); and the role of statutory law is also empirically undetermined. Despite these overly generous generalisations, Sklar points us in the right direction. As Olufemi Vaughan has it in the same volume, there lies a potential in using “indigenous political structures as the medium to interrogate the culture of politics so that we can relate local ideas of participatory politics to modern notions of governance” (2005, p. 3). Note that for our case, we take no issue with the implicit binary between local and national, traditional and modern—despite the well-established criticism, for example, by Benda-Beckmann (1979): all actors who encounter each other along the Omo River would agree this binary applies, and seek to uphold it, even as there are about 120 years of ever-tightening encapsulation by the Ethiopian state that inform Kara political notions as well— which is of course drastically shorter than such a situation has obtained in other parts of Africa, even some similarly marked by state-evasive practices like (agro-)pastoralism. Nearly 70  years ago, Max Gluckman said in his contribution to a collection of BBC broadcasts: I have described these primitive political institutions in the past tense, even though we can still observe some of the social processes at work. But, of course, the whole situation in which they operate has been altered. In Africa these peoples are now a part of the Western world, and the major problems which they face are those arising out of Western overlordship and economic expansion. (Gluckman 1954, pp. 78–79)

130 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

And of course, the Kara are part of the (sic!) ‘Western world’ and have been—effectively as formally—a part of the Ethiopian nation-state for a long time, but the fundamental transformation of institutions that Gluckman describes for elsewhere already so long ago has not quite occurred here. This again returns us to the specificities not only of Ethiopia in general, but of the lower Omo Valley in particular. To put things in a comparative perspective, the political dynamics in the Omo Valley are a far cry from the ‘neotraditionalization’ processes described for southern Africa (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 2018) where “[n]eotraditional leaders have increasingly become gatekeepers between the three spheres [tradition, capital, the state] […] and offer (global) corporations access to resources and workers” (Krämer 2020, p.  318). In Ethiopia, with its determined pursuit of the ‘developmental state’ model, even the currently greatly expanding extractive penetration of  the lowlands has only rarely and tentatively involved ‘traditional leaders’—or, as recent state-supported intimidation campaigns against Mun and Suri in South Omo demonstrated, only as prime targets for violence, harassment and symbolic denigration.

3   Authority in Kara Asking, as this volume does, how conflicting notions of authority interact in regard to legitimacy today, invites reflection on the Kara ideal-type of authority. How do they understand somebody’s claims regarding their (or, to be clear about the gendered quality of the matter, his) uncontested and possibly uncontestable sovereignty over various aspects of social, political and spiritual life? In what many would consider as an anachronism in contemporary East Africa, this leads us to the work of the bitti, the spiritual leaders of Kara, who—as far as anyone can tell—have held office in ways largely unchanged over centuries; they are sometimes called pe bitti, where pe indicates the entirety of Kara country. But our sources on the conditions in the area beyond the early days of the twentieth century are sparse. It has to be kept in mind that the first Western explorers reached the Omo Valley only in the 1880s, and trained researchers arrived much later.10 The early travellers and researchers had more success in mapping 10  In addition to the already introduced Jon Abbink and his research among the Suri (also: Surma), most notable are the oeuvres by David Turton on the Mun (also: Mursi), Jean Lydall and Ivo Strecker on Hamar, Serge Tornay on the Nyangatom, and Almagor on the

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

131

material culture than the more subtle workings of indigenous office. The first ethnographic work on the Kara was an Ethiopian MA thesis (Gezahegn 1994), even as many of the Kara’s neighbours have been studied intensely since the 1960s and 1970s.11 So while historical depth is indeed murky here, and written sources poor, nothing from oral history indicates that the role, powers and legitimacy of the bitti has changed in any significant manner over this time. Our argument is that, to understand the vicissitudes of governance in southwestern Ethiopia today, which reflect precisely contestations of authority, bittamo, the work of the bitti, holds the key. Analysis of the work of the bitti themselves and—through a process of seeming devolution—other decision-makers such as the council of elders and heads of households or even lineages complicates the relation between knowledge, legitimacy and authority, as well as between agency and accountability.12 It can be assumed that the term bitti for the ritual leader is the source from which other iterations spring forth: the political council members called the borkotto bitti are ‘like’ the bitti but marked by sitting on their wooden headrests (borkotto) for conversations a lot; and every elder (i.e. married man) is ‘like’ a bitti of his own household and lineage affairs, even if he can control conduct within the household much more effectively and directly than any bitti could command people. Lydall and Strecker (1979) suggest that the etymology derives from ‘the first’ (to arrive somewhere) for the Hamar analogue of bitta, which is plausible for Kara too (see also Donham 2000). The complexities of the empirical case are compounded by the fact that the central analytical terms that apply in this context—power, legitimacy, authority itself—are conceptually contested while often ending up employed as largely overlapping designations. Can one define authority Dassanech. Especially since the 2000s, a broad international cohort of younger researchers has further advanced the study of South Omo, increasingly addressing regional interconnections, infrastructural transformations and state encapsulation in their ethnographies. 11  Kara is a written language today only in that young men have started impromptu transliterating their mother tongue into either Latin or Amharic script (increasingly for social media communication), but without any sort of formal or technical oversight. 12  The Kara lineages (moro) each belong to one of the clans (olo), which are properly segmentary in that they are in principle politically equal, even as demographically they are emphatically not. Clans are kinship units writ large, and rarely act as corporate political groups; they have no internal structure other than that contingently arising out of the alliances of any given set of elders.

132 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

without reference to legitimacy? Does authority depend on power, or is it power, or is it the opposite of power? For anthropologists with the ambition to ground our analytic discussions in local vernaculars, even trying to translate these terms into local equivalents is usually and at best fraught and more likely a  frustrating endeavour. During his fieldwork in Kara, Girke acquired the language through everyday use (as there were no written materials available), and never made much effort to lay down a coherent word list for abstract notions. A junior colleague however once did, and the translation she received for ‘power’ was kanta—a term which actually refers to the physiological joints of the body. While this proved a fascinating insight into Kara metaphoric repertoires (because who would not have expected ‘muscles’ as a referent for ‘strength’ and ‘ability to impose one’s will’?), it is not a translation of power that allows for a clear distinction from other, cognate concepts. Dunga confirms that the translation of analytical English concepts into Kara is difficult, and often would the national language Amharic serve as a medium, which certainly establishes imprecise conceptual correspondences as well. To approximate the notions of authority, legitimacy and power in Kara, we have chosen Steven Lukes’ particularly analytic approach in order to first clarify our (English) terms and then use this vocabulary to approach the empirical data from South Omo. In his “radical view” on power, Lukes first assesses a number of ‘one-’ and ‘two-dimensional’ understandings of power, among them an earlier approach by Bachrach and Baratz building on a typology in which power “embraces coercion, influence, authority, force and manipulation” (2005, p.  21); these subtypes of power are distinguished by their operational modalities: coercion relies on the ‘threat of deprivation’, influence is A’s ability to make B comply without explicit or tacit threats, and authority can be diagnosed when B does not object to A’s demand, “either because its content is legitimate and reasonable or because it has been arrived at through a legitimate and reasonable procedure” (2005, pp. 21–22). Force goes beyond coercion still by not leaving B any option, and manipulation is understood as a special case of force, as B does not fully realize they are complying with a demand from A. While incorporating parts of this typology (while explicitly dismissing Parsonian understandings of power that simply define away coercion in their efforts to highlight social integration), Lukes’ sophisticated criticism leads him to the realisation that the key element in a necessary ‘three-dimensional model’ must be the question of cooperation and dovetailing interests. Bluntly speaking,

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

133

power may or may not be a form of influence—depending on whether sanctions are involved; while influence and authority may or may not be a form of power—depending on whether a conflict of interests is involved. Consensual authority, with no conflict of interests, is not, therefore, a form of power. (Lukes 2005, p. 35)

The discussion of Lukes’ model could be extended, but for the issues we are concerned with, this is a useful jumping-off point: if we speak of authority, we do not fully disclaim elements of coercion. But we do suggest that phenomenologically speaking, the people complying with an other’s demands do not have the sense that they are not given are choice or are forced to comply, or tricked into complying: their compliance makes sense to them, is reasonable, warranted, possibly just (or: legitimate) and likely prudent. This returns us to Abbink’s exploration of authority among the Suri: The Surma are a segmentary society, based on strong ideas of equality and balance between individuals and territorial sections. They do not know the chieftaincy as an institution of hierarchical political authority. Surma have no persons with executive functions, redistribution rights and judicial authority. […] Authority among them is not a question of ‘governing’, but of debate, of ‘coming to terms with each other’ in dialogue. Through this, the right course of action and a balance between divergent interests are negotiated. (Abbink 1999, p. 57)

There are differences between this and Kara (and practically all the groups shown on the map above) only in degree, not in kind: Kara society is riven with a surprising number of internal divisions for a population so small (see Girke 2018, pp. 48–76), both segmentary and not. It is worth highlighting that the Kara of course ‘know’ that there are chieftaincies elsewhere and have a good idea why they prefer to do without them. But if they are no chieftains, what are the bitti? For Suri society, Abbink states that “the unifying institutions whereby authority is constructed are two: a ‘reigning’ age-grade of elders, and a ritual leader or figurehead, called komoru” (1999, p. 57). While the Kara do maintain an age-set system that ritually as well as practically pre-structures male (and, to a degree, female) coming-of-age, peerage and cooperation, and while in general, a gerontocratic principle applies, no age-group can lay claim to power by virtue of formal rank. Instead, reinforcing Abbink’s emphasis on debate, there is a self-appointed council of elders which recruits its members from among

134 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

adult men of all ages, and seeks to dominate public opinion and pre-empt factionalism. Calling themselves the borkotto bitti, the ‘leaders of the headrest’, they quite strategically exercise influence, characterised by Lukes as effectively making people change their course of action—“inducement, encouragement, persuasion, etc.” (see the diagram in Lukes 2005, p. 36), a bit short of ‘manipulation’.13 The practice of the borkotto bitti’s work suggests empirical limits to Lukes’ model, so importantly based on the question whether there is a conflict of interest in a situation (so that coercion, force or manipulation are employed) or not: much of the debating labour they perform is aimed at achieving a broad consensus that there is, in fact, no conflict of interest—often by skilfully shifting the frame of reference from a factional conflict to a broader perspective of what an incident means for all of Kara. The borkotti bitti of Kara can thus be assumed to be the functional equivalent to the Suri’s reigning age-grade, while the Kara bitti proper is the analogue to the komoru. This equivalence is far from an analytic designation: the Kara, Mun, Hamar, Nyangatom and Suri all know about each other and are—mostly corresponding to spatial proximity—tightly entangled and familiar with their neighbours. Many elders speak several of the regional languages and have extensive networks of exchange and other partnerships (see Girke 2010 for the example of regional bondfriendship), and that mutual knowledge is not merely practical, but also genuinely interest-based. This quality of the region has been called the “cultural neighbourhood” (see the contributions to Gabbert and Thubauville 2010), and one of its manifestations is that people are aware that all these others are structurally similar to them: they know that while cultural details will differ, there is a broad agreement on (pastoralist) values, and social institutions and rituals are broadly seen as equivalent. Thus, “a Kara bitti is a Mursi komoru is an Arbore kawut is a Hamar bitta is a ritual leader” (Girke 2018, p. 156).14 Again Abbink: The word komoru has an elusive character and challenges any translation. ‘Chief’ is not really the right word, because the person with this role has no executive, enforceable power over others. Although he is seen as barari, i.e. having a certain supernatural power, or charisma in its most basic form, he  See Girke (2011) for a dedicated discussion of borkotto bitti.  David Turton, having studied the Mun, who are culturally and linguistically closely related to the Suri, translated komoru as ‘priest’ (1973, p.  328). But as Abbink rightly adduces, “there is no well-defined supernatural belief structure of which the komoru is a custodian” (1999, p. 58). 13 14

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

135

is not a hierarchical authority figure with executive powers. He does not distribute land, dispense justice, or impose sanctions. (1999, p. 58)

This description fully applies to the Kara bitti as well. The supernatural power lies in certain rituals he performs; Dunga specifically emphasizes casting out diseases both human and animal, blessing cattle and bees, and protecting settlements from the misfortune resulting from inauspicious practices or breaches of taboo (see Fig.  2). But the blood of the bitti’s entire lineage has specific qualities as well: it must not be spilled, or great pollution threatens. Engaging anew with the classic (and robustly refined) discussions of offices and institutions under conditions of regulated anarchy, Girke’s earlier use of the term ‘ritual’ or ‘spiritual leader’ for the bitti invites questioning. Sigrist (1967, pp.  119–120) discusses similar cases explicitly not in terms of ‘leadership’ but calls people like the Luya rainmaker “experts”, who have no public authorisation to police other community members’ conduct. Partly, this serves to counter earlier tendencies by travellers and researchers to seek out and inevitably discover Frazerian

Fig. 2  Protective plants laid out by the bitti and his aides across a path into the village Dus during a conflict between Kara and Nyangatom, November 2006. (Photo by Felix Girke)

136 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

sacred kingship throughout Africa, sometimes on spurious empirical basis (1967, p. 118). The point is well-taken; still, we maintain that bitti are more than experts (see Turton 1973, p. 258): as mentioned, the semantic root of bitti indicates an act of ‘leading’, and the Kara sense that the well-­ being of the entire population depends on the bitti precludes reducing them to experts who offer their services transactionally. Mediation and conflict resolution are other central tasks, and the bitti’s ritual gateway is the site of cleansing ceremonies. Early during fieldwork in 2004, Girke saw a young man sprint across the village and dive through the low entrance of the bitti’s hut to seek refuge from angered pursuers, a practice familiar from the Nuer leopard-skin chiefs. Evans-Pritchard called the leopard-skin chief of the Nuer a “sacred person without political authority” (1940, p. 5), a statement that seems to apply equally to the bitti and brings out that authority and legitimacy in Kara must be seen as strictly independent variables. Abbink goes on to list the specific “functions” of the komoru, some of which are in Kara also vested in the bitti, such as “acting as a ritual ‘war leader’ ” who blesses departing raiders, “act as ‘sacrificer’ at certain social and ritual occasions” and “ritually initiate fields for cultivation” (1999, p. 58). As entailed in the notion of the cultural neighbourhood, these and other matters find their correspondences among other peoples of South Omo, and Dunga recalls being told in his youth already that not only had the Dangarr, the clan to which the most important Kara bitti must belong, originally been from Arbore (far to the East), but that specifically the ritual of washing the guns of raiders was the same in both places. Beyond these direct parallels, the Kara would consider other tasks of the Suri komoru as reasonable and plausible for a bitti. But it is Abbink’s subsequent characterisation that advances not only the empirical comparison but also the theoretical debate: […] the komoru [sic] is both a guardian or role-model in the social order of the Surma. […] The komoru is a normative figure, and as such universally respected. A komoru gets his position by a combination of ascriptive and achieved criteria: he comes from one of the old Surma clans, he must have intelligence and charisma, be a good public speaker and should not show an impatient or aggressive character. (Abbink 1999, p. 59)

What does it mean for an individual to assume such a position, then? What does it mean to be in line for succession? How does one cultivate the

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

137

necessary qualities? What does it feel like having to become not only a ‘role-model’, but also to literally guard an entire polity from misfortune? It is at this point that it becomes necessary to include another aspect into the discussion of the authority of the bitti: personal qualifications, here both bequeathed by birth and earned by earnestness. As a member of the Dangarr clan of Kara, Dunga belongs to that central biti  lineage (moro); at the same time, he is one of the best-educated Kara today and spends much of his time outside the homeland. His perspective on bittamo is uniquely shaped to reconcile the functional aspects of being bitti— which, as Abbink demonstrates, are part of the cultural grammar of the entire region15—with a subject-centred perspective  (compare Turton 1973, pp. 262–267). Dunga wrote a reflection about his quandary in one of our correspondences over the draft of this text which we decided to reproduce in full here: My mother, my brother, and aunt Surmudo, the mother of Lale, Sime, the sister of Kornan’s [his late elder brother’s] mother, and elders of the village like Utini and other Dangarr clan members have told me about the bittamo of Kara, that I would become bitti of the Kara one day in my life. It is true: one day in the future I might become bitti and all community members will respect me: my blood is special, no one will fight with me, all of Lechin’s [the current bitti] role will pass over to me, and my life would then become very different from that of other Kara, as I am Dangarr, of the bitti clan. But this happens if and only if I settle in Kara, accepting all cultural obligations, like traditional marriage. I would need to live within the community territory. I should settle permanently in Kara Dus [the main village] and do spiritual and ritual work for the society. But I have a big responsibility in government, representing the Kara community. Even now I am working in the South Omo Zone council as legal justice and good governance affairs chairperson, as well as representing Kara in the federal House of Federations [in Addis Ababa]. (Dunga Nakuwa, Email to Felix Girke, Dec. 22, 2019) 15  Abbink emphasizes that the Suri komoru is very different from the ‘sacred chief’ of the neighboring Dizi—and in fact, from the Kara perspective, the Dizi are already too far away to matter much in the imaginary of the cultural neighborhood. What the map depicted earlier does not reveal too clearly is the difference in elevation of the various territories, but as soon as one ventures too far from the Omo River proper, for example, in the mountains of Aari and Maale or even Konso to the East, the pronounced egalitarianism of the lowlands gives way to more hierarchically structured highland societies, with kings, sacred chiefs, nobility and serfdom. It is interesting to note that while Abbink discusses the changes of the role of the komoru due to the vagaries of the twentieth century in Ethiopia, he does not look south to the other groups of South Omo for comparison.

138 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

4   Bittamo as Duty But the Kara bitti, similarly to the Suri komoru, are not supposed to travel far. They are bound by their duties to be in the land that they seem to embody in some way. There are also numerous taboos imposed on bitti, such as a prohibition on eating fish and not going fishing themselves, or eating certain birds and the heads or tongues of animals. In general, Kara disdain eating things just ‘found’ in nature rather than cultivated, husbanded or at the very least hunted (and then they strongly prefer even-­ toed ungulates that have a family resemblance to their sheep, goats and cattle), and it is a common form of personal distinction to ostentatiously avoid other foodstuffs. But bitti are also supposed to abstain from common activities such as milking, making beehives or even hunting, a typical male prestige activity. While by their very nature, breaches of such taboos usually remain in the hypothetical, Dunga was told that bitti lose their spiritual capabilities and the acceptance of the people, and he came up with the tautological and yet insightful expression that “he has a duty to keep his taboos”, which suggests that the bitti’s breaking of taboos would be more severe than common people’s transgressions: and once they have become grandparents, all elders are subject to similar taboos.16 If, however, the bitti does his work properly and the people fail to respect him, his abilities to sanction the community are broad: he can withhold his blessing, refuse to chase away locusts or cast out disease, so that very existential threats could penetrate the land unhindered. The services other Kara provide for the bitti can be summarized as symbolic alleviations of labour efforts: they build a house for him, they offer him honey if they collect any, they let him share in the spoils of the hunt, and even collectively work on his field, a service other people have to reward with generous preparations of sorghum beer. If a bitti seeks a wife, the ordeal of requesting a ‘girl’ (anza, as all unmarried women are identified, regardless of age) from another clan will be much easier than it is for other men, as a bitti needs a wife, whose role in his rituals is considerable.17 Abbink 16  While it might seem unlikely that people would in fact adhere closely to such prohibitions, the threat of being blamed for spiritual misfortune following on apparent breaches of ritual taboos does, in fact, strongly constrain people; one well-known elder who had become a father very early in life sought to stall his own sons marriage for a long time, trying to delay his own ascendance into the undesirable and yet high status of a grandfather. 17  Intriguingly, while Kara in general allow polygyny (if a man thinks it a good idea and can afford the bride price), the bitti is only allowed a monogamous marriage; the reason for this

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

139

captures such a constellation well by suggesting that legitimacy here “should be construed as a structure of consent based on perceptions of reciprocity” (2005, p. 161). This, Dunga emphasizes, has not changed throughout known history; the importance of the bitti for Kara is unbroken and nobody has ever offered a sustained challenge to a bitti. If a bitti would be ill-treated, he could withhold his essential blessings and even curse the land—but to our knowledge, this is still only a hypothetical scenario. Girke was once present at a public meeting where the borkotto bitti council verbally chastised one of their own who had in a drunken state accosted the bitti—the man was left with no doubt that he was considered futile, childish and a bad example to all. But the bitti is not only important for the Kara themselves: today, he is expected to participate in government-sponsored peace-­ making ceremonies, to lend a symbolic heft to the proceedings. Increasingly, Dunga asserts, there are also attempts by mengist (the shorthand for the conflated chimera of government-state-Ethiopian highlanders) to enlist the bitti in campaigns against so-called ‘harmful traditional practices’ and to endorse the relative innovation of local schooling; administrators thus try to piggy-back on what they understand of Kara beliefs and claim that this would be part of the duty of a ritual leader in his service to ‘the community’, in a soft echo of the methods of indirect rule. Girke has rarely witnessed such an explicit and targeted enlistment of the bitti by government representatives during his longer fieldwork stays between 2003 and 2008, but the trend seems to have gained momentum since. Becoming enlisted for such state services can imperil the reputation of common Kara elders, who basically need to prove that their loyalties are not contested; the bitti is not subject to such implicit suspicion. remains unclear. Polygyny is pursued for a variety of reasons and its role in maintaining and expressing the ethnic hierarchy within Kara has been discussed elsewhere (see Girke 2018, pp. 83–103). Relevant here is that marriages are negotiated between the suitor and his go-­ between on the one hand and a given girl’s father on the other; the bride-to-be has even today very little say. Second wives are in principle accorded a lower status initially, and some parents are reluctant to release their daughters into a polygynous marriage. Women only really have a choice in their partners once they are widowed and can decide for themselves with whom to arrange an informal partnership (called baski). Sigrist’s discussion of the various advantages of polygyny for a man (1967, p. 170) is intriguing and plausible, but it would be conjectural at this point to suggest that Kara would actively deprive their bitti of these advantages in order to, for example, constrain his influence in effectively limiting the number of children he might beget.

140 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

This ties in to broader postcolonial patterns. In his magisterial Gesellschaft und Staat in Afrika, Gerhard Hauck remarks that such claims of legitimacy really are public justifications of (new) injustices that have come about in the establishment and perpetuation of the postcolonial states (2001, p.  237), reiterating the enduring relevance of Weber’s emphasis on Legitimitätsglaube (or ‘belief in legitimacy’) from part III of his Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft (1956). Looking at Africa across the board, Hauck includes “civil society” in this indictment, as he diagnoses it to be an “arrangement” that is quite permeable to the market and easily assimilated by the state, in the end not questioning, but legitimizing (national) governance (2001, pp.  264–265). The point is of course that whoever proclaims their own legitimacy understands it needs boosting, and that peripheral groups have their own ‘authorities’ who already are legitimate is a simple cliché, but nevertheless a regularly encountered basic assumption of (postcolonial) governance, for better or for worse. But is this succeeding? We argue that it is not, and as we have shown, there are very foundational reasons that make it near-impossible for members of the state administration to be accorded authority by Kara. While state personnel— especially when dispatched to the outmost peripheries of the country— claim legitimacy on the basis of their impersonal role in the state apparatus and their de jure authority, legitimacy in Kara can only be derived from accountability and dutiful conduct, in the spirit of reciprocity between bitti and the people. Accordingly, claims to rule are a swift way to undermine legitimacy. Analysing his data from Madagascar, David Graeber offers a particularly apt way of (re)conceptualizing the authority and legitimacy in such constellations: […] the authority of elders and ancestors is considered—especially in public contexts—absolutely legitimate, indeed, as the very foundation of social order. Elders and ancestors are seen as legitimate, however, largely because they are not seen as operating like kings […] Rather than telling others what to do, they are seen as properly intervening in human affairs in order to tell others what not to do. (2007, p. 53)

He coins the term “negative authority” to characterize this reversal: his Merina elders, as well as the Kara bitti, exercise “moral rhetoric” to prevent trouble, rather than in the service of any particular agenda. They appeal to the populace to do the right thing, rather than asking them to

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

141

submit and subordinate their own subjectivities; this is pertinent, considering that in Kara, men react badly to having their personal autonomy constrained.

5   Becoming Bitti Kara assign sovereignty to a body politic as made up by able adult and married men, and both the borkotto bitti and the kabin (the government-­ appointed and poorly salaried community chairmen whom the male elders of a given settlement area select to mediate their affairs with the district institutions) are measured by the rule that they are to serve the people. Their legitimacy is bound up in their conduct, their authority is at best grudgingly, temporarily and tentatively granted. But the bitti ritual leader of Kara is emphatically excluded from both offices, kabin and borkotto bitti: clearly, this most important individual role in the land is considered incompatible with the entanglements that come with these other positions. With Lukes, again, there certainly remains the sense that these other officeholders inevitably come to pursue their own objectives, and that their work for the people is not fully disinterested. As we have argued, civilian state representatives are seen as more or less hapless puppets of a potentially coercive state-government-‘ethnic other’ hybrid collectively referred to as mengist, and these individuals are seen to do their work more or less accountably. Legitimacy for them is not attainable in Kara, as their guardianship is doubtful and they do not (and cannot) act as moral and spiritual “role-models” (as Abbink had it, cited above), and any Kara who is too tightly involved in state institutions, and be it just the district administration or even NGO work, runs the risk of suspicion-by-association. To earn money from the state as a kabin opens people up to the potential indictment of ‘eating’—of opportunistic profiting and, in effect, selling out their own people. Our description and analysis of the importance of bittamo for understanding the challenges of authority and legitimacy in Kara is not merely academic: Dunga, as the son of Nakuwa and the grandson of the former bitti Batum, is in line of becoming bitti himself one day. He currently does not reside in Kara proper all the time, but spends many days in Dimeka, the centre of the district, in Jinka, the centre of the South Omo zone, and in Addis Ababa, where he has a parliamentary function. Especially in recent years, whenever we happened to spend time together in Kara, Girke had the impression that some elders made an effort to spend time with

142 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

Dunga, talking to him, questioning him, as if they were at the same time both canvassing his capabilities and reminding him of what might lie ahead; Dunga confirms this impression. His dilemma is clear, and here it becomes apparent how the office of the bitti has changed in recent years after all: the highest office makes the strictest demands, and having to permanently live in Kara after arduous years of struggling for higher education and making his way as an underdog in the state institutions, Dunga will eventually have to face the question of whether he wants to give up all this and become a traditional bitti. No earlier candidate for bittamo had had the opportunities Dunga has so far enjoyed—in this regard, the encapsulation of Kara in the Ethiopian state truly has changed conditions and provided opportunities—and none of them, when called to office, had to renounce his earlier life quite so totally. But legitimacy in Kara depends on complete dedication and a perpetual display of readiness to do one’s work for the people, the land and the animals. The local idiom does not proclaim that the bitti should be the servant of the people, as the kabin are always explicitly reminded that they are, and the proposition would sound strange and amiss to a Kara. But there is some truth to it that being a bitti is more constraining than empowering, more of a burden than a boon, and that being the physical embodiment of the entire country’s weal is a particular and existential sacrifice: in becoming bitti, one has to surrender all individual aspirations, including the very limited ‘power’ enjoyed by the kabin, for example. Accordingly, as per Lukes’ model, there can never occur a conflict of interest between the bitti and the Kara at large: anybody who would oppose the bitti would not just be unruly, but would simply be mistaken in assuming that there was a tenable, even self-interested position that could be opposed to the bitti’s negative authority. To tie incontestable legitimacy to the greatest personal restrictions seems, then, a central element of political philosophy among the Kara and their neighbours, and as defining of bittamo as any specific ritual function that one could list. Referring to the new administrative structures imposed by the then-new government on the Suri, Abbink noted that the Surma komorus—the most respected figureheads and reference points of internal peace and social order for the Surma—will continue to act as authoritative ritual intermediaries in their own polity, they cannot but lose their prestige and role even further as the new leadership gains a foothold. (1999, p. 71)

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

143

And here is, then, a path-dependent difference within the cultural neighbourhood: even as the models of authority and legitimacy are in principle the same between Kara and Suri (as Abbink himself notes, 1999, p. 70, fn. 28), in Kara the situation has come about that young men like Dunga, even as they participate in and profit from state institutions (such as higher education), have not been co-opted into trying to erode traditional office—and, in his case, might well even come to assume it. It is tempting to end this text on further speculation on how this specific configuration of Dunga becoming a bitti might eventually trigger changes in the very understanding of bittamo, its relations to the state and the state-representatives hope for legitimacy, as well as the duties being and becoming bitti in Kara entails. But in the face of the fraught and existential choice faced by Dunga, a more effective ending must reflect this uncertainty: does ‘authority’ in the analytical sense as Lukes derives it from the Weberian basis even exist as an element of Kara institutions? Or, are the Kara still, today, a “tribe without rulers”, to echo a classic book title (Middleton and Tait 1958), but well aware of what they are rejecting? Abbink discussed the “elusive chief”—but not only are chiefs elusive, but the very social relation on which chieftaincy might build, and on which subsequently the Ethiopian state’s enlistment of ‘traditional leaders’ is predicated, is just as elusive. Bittamo does assign spiritual dominion over a certain social realm (be it all of Kara or just the own household or fields), but it reflects demands of accountability and responsible action much more than command; arguably, it brings with it less authority than becoming an elder and head of a household: in the Kara language, fatherhood semantically overlaps with ownership, and male elders truly can enforce compliance from members of their household—if they overstep, it is up to other individuals to reign them in. But the bitti as the one office holder who receives unconditional consent cannot by virtue of office have his own agenda (and thus, power); all other office holders, be it the members of the self-appointed borkotto bitti council or the government-salaried kabin, have to walk a very fine line indeed so as not to be branded as self-interested opportunists. The Kara are aware that they are expected to display a certain mode of behaviour during public meetings with state representatives. But seeing that the people they encounter in these arenas literally change with the season (so how could they be accountable?) nor seem particularly dutiful, the Kara’s challenge to the claims of authority as manifested in individual emissaries to the lowlands will likely endure—and if by now no local educated elite

144 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

(to which Dunga would primarily belong) has usurped and eroded the traditional office of the bitti, the gap between these two distinct models of authority might not merge into a new regime of legitimacy for a while yet. The institution and its social ramifications might well persist—but possibly at the cost of the intense personal contradictions experienced by Dunga.

References Abbink, Jon G. (2012). Dam Controversies: Contested Governance and Developmental Discourse on the Ethiopian Omo River Dam. In: Social Anthropology, 20 (2), pp. 125–144. Abbink, Jon G. (2005). Local Leadership and State Governance in Southern Ethiopia: From Charisma to Bureaucracy. In: Vaughan, Olufemi (Ed.), Tradition and Politics. Indigenous Political Structures in Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 159–183. Abbink, Jon G. (1999). The Elusive Chief: Authority and Leadership in Surma Society (Ethiopia). In: Van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, E. A. B. / Van Dijk, R. A. (Eds.), African Chieftainship in a New Socio-Political Landscape. Münster: Lit, pp. 49–74. Abbink, Jon G. (1993). Ethnic Conflict in the ‘Tribal Zone’: The Dizi and Suri in Southern Ethiopia. In: The Journal of Modern African Studies, 32 (4), pp. 675–682. Benda-Beckmann, Franz (1979). Modernes Recht und traditionelle Gesellschaften. In: Verfassung und Recht in Übersee, 12 (4), pp. 337–351. Beyer, Judith (2016). The Force of Custom. Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bohannan, Paul (1965). The Differing Realms of Law. In: American Anthropologist, 67 (6/2), pp. 33–42. Clapham, Christopher (2018). The Ethiopian Developmental State. In: Third World Quarterly, 39 (6), pp. 1151–1165. Comaroff, John L. / Comaroff, Jean (2018). Chiefs, Capital and the State in Contemporary Africa: An Introduction. In: Comaroff, John L. / Comaroff, Jean (Eds.), The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–48. Donham, Donald L. (2000). On Being “First”: Making History by Two’s in Southern Ethiopia. Northeast African Studies (N.S.), 7 (3), pp. 21–34. Donham, Donald L. / James, Wendy (Eds.) (1986). The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia: Essays in History and Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  BITTAMO: AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND DUTY 

145

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. (1940). The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ferguson, R. Brian / Whitehead, Neil L. (2000). The Violent Edge of Empire. In: Ferguson, R.  Brian / Whitehead, Neil L. (Eds.), War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 1–30. Gabbert, Echi C. / Gebresenbet, Fana / Galaty, John G. / Schlee, Günther (Eds.) (2021). Lands of the Future: Anthropological Perspectives on Pastoralism, Land Deals and Tropes of Modernity in Eastern Africa. Oxford, New York, NY: Berghahn. Gabbert, Echi C. (2012). Deciding Peace: Knowledge about War and Peace among the Arbore of Southern Ethiopia. Ph.D. dissertation. Halle (Saale): Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Institute for Social Anthropology. Gabbert, Echi C. / Thubauville, Sophia (Eds.) (2010). To Live with Others: Modalities of Cultural Neighbourhood in South Omo. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. Gezahegn, Petros (1994). The Karo of the Lower Omo Valley: Subsistence, Social Organisation and Relationships with Neighboring Groups. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University, MA Thesis. Girke, Felix (2018). The Wheel of Autonomy: Rhetoric and Ethnicity in the Omo Valley. New York, NY: Berghahn. Girke, Felix (2016). The ‘Art of Not Being Governed’ in Ethiopia: Towards a More Dynamic Approach to the Highlands/Lowlands Academic Divide. In: Ficquet, Éloi / Hassen, Ahmed / Osmond, Thomas (Eds.), Movements in Ethiopia, Ethiopia in Movement. Vol. 2. Los Angeles, CA: Tsehai Publishers, pp. 13–26. Girke, Felix (2015). The Uncertainty of Power and the Certainty of Irony: Encountering the State in Kara, Southern Ethiopia. In: Hariman, Robert / Cintron, Ralph (Eds.), Culture, Catastrophe and Rhetoric: The Texture of Political Action. Oxford, New York, NY: Berghahn, pp. 168–193. Girke, Felix (2013). Homeland, Boundary, Resource: The Collision of Place-­ Making Projects on the Lower Omo River, Ethiopia. Halle / Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Girke, Felix (2011). Plato on the Omo: Reflections on Decision-Making among the Kara of Southern Ethiopia. In: Journal of Eastern African Studies, 5 (1), pp. 177–194. Girke, Felix (2010). Bondfriendship in the Cultural Neighborhood: Dyadic Ties and Their Public Appreciation in South Omo. In: Gabbert, Echi / Thubauville, Sophia (Eds.), To Live with Others: Modalities of Cultural Neighbourhood in South Omo. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, pp. 67–98. Girke, Felix (2008). The Kara-Nyangatom War of 2006–07: Dynamics of Escalating Violence in the Tribal Zone. In: Bruchhaus, Eva-Maria / Sommer,

146 

F. GIRKE AND D. N. BATUM

Monika M. (Eds.), Hot Spot Horn of Africa Revisited: Approaches to Make Sense of Conflict. Berlin: Lit, pp. 192–207. Gluckman, Max (1954). Political Institutions. In: Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. (Ed.), Institutions in Primitive Societies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, pp. 66–80. Graeber, David (2007). Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hauck, Gerhard (2001). Gesellschaft und Staat in Afrika. Frankfurt a.M.: Brandes & Apsel. Krämer, Mario (2020). Neotraditional Authority Contested: The Corporatization of Tradition and the Quest for Democracy in the Topnaar Traditional Authority, Namibia. In: Africa, 90 (2), pp. 318–338. Lukes, Steven (2005). Power: A Radical View. (First published in 1974) Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Lydall, Jean / Strecker, Ivo (1979). Baldambe Explains: The Hamar of Southern Ethiopia II. Hohenschäftlarn: Klaus Renner. Mennasemay, Maimire (1997). Adwa: A Dialogue Between the Past and the Present. In: Northeast African Studies (N.S.), 4 (2), pp. 43–89. Middleton, John / Tait, David (Eds.) (1958). Tribes Without Rulers: Studies in African Segmentary Systems. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Scott, James C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Shea, Neil (2010). Africa’s Last Frontier. In: National Geographic, March Issue, pp. 500–528. Sigrist, Christian (1967). Regulierte Anarchie: Untersuchung zum Fehlen und zur Entstehung politischer Herrschaft in segmentären Gesellschaften Afrikas. Olten, Freiburg: Walter-Verlag. Sklar, Richard L. (2005). The Premise of Mixed Government in African Political Studies. In: Vaughan, Olufemi (Ed.), Tradition and Politics: Indigenous Political Structures in Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 13–32. Turton, David (2011). Wilderness, Wasteland or Home? Three Ways of Imagining the Lower Omo Valley. In: Journal of Eastern African Studies, 5 (1), pp. 158–176. Turton, David (1973). The Social Organization of the Mursi, a Pastoral Tribe of the Lower Omo, Southwest Ethiopia. London: LSE, PhD Thesis. Vaughan, Olufemi (2005). Introduction. In Vaughan, Olufemi (Ed.), Tradition and Politics: Indigenous Political Structures in Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 1–10. Weber, Max (1956). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. (First published in 1921/22) Tübingen: Mohr.

In Search of Democracy: Gadaa as a Political Ideal, or the Legitimacy of Traditional Authority in Times of Turmoil and Unease Andrea Nicolas

1   Introduction African intellectual and revolutionary movements in the 1970s and 1980s frequently rejected ‘traditionalism’ or ‘tribalism’ as impediments to social change.1 However, discourses of authority and political legitimacy have changed. No longer does it seem problematic to refer to ‘tradition’ when aiming at social and political change and alternative societal visions and aims in many African contexts. Governments have also found ‘tradition’ to be an asset in gaining support for their policies (Paley 2002, p. 474). With the revitalisation of ethnicity as a mobilising force, ‘democracy’ and ‘tradition’ (or ‘culture’, in its semantic variant), have joined together in both political action and rhetoric in several places. Their union challenges long-­ standing ‘Western’ paradigms and notions of the democratic quest: time 1

 See, for example, Mbuyinga (1989); cf. Hagmann and Abbink (2013, p. 1).

A. Nicolas (*) Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_6

147

148 

A. NICOLAS

seems ripe for a renegotiation of the meaning and political shape of ‘democracy’ itself. The following chapter will bring Ethiopia to the fore, where political actors revitalise and combine ‘cultural’/‘traditional’ and ‘democratic’ values in their struggles. It examines the increasing role of the Oromo traditional age- and generation organisation, called gadaa, and its political invocation in Ethiopia. The chapter reviews major developments over the past two decades concerning gadaa and discusses the system’s contemporary role in Ethiopia, based on repeated field research in East Shewa between 1995 and 2017,2 as well as on news reports dealing with most recent events in the country in 2018 and 2019. The question addressed is how and why the concepts and discourses about gadaa and democracy came to be inseparably connected and intertwined: gadaa and democracy, in political and scholarly discourse in and outside Ethiopia, have become almost conterminous. The chapter brings forward the thesis that the two terms share certain histories and commonalities in their usage, disengaging from their original sources and any concrete organisational structures in the discourse, and instead becoming more abstract concepts about morality, nationality, and political philosophy. The chapter thus addresses three closely interrelated political dynamics. One is a new political rhetoric, and powerful postcolonial postulate, of ‘indigenous democracy’, which asserts a constitutive sameness between democracy and gadaa, thus actively challenging ‘Western’ prerogatives to defining democracy. The second is competition between Ethiopian state and opposition parties to claim the rightful inheritance to this democratic tradition, in their rivalling attempts to gain political legitimacy. The third concerns the government party actively intervening and modifying the functioning of the traditional system, in order to make use of gadaa for state-political agendas. This is all the more relevant, as over the past few years, turmoil and uprisings have shattered the country, which the Ethiopian state aims at pacifying by the help of traditional authorities. As the analysis shows, all three dynamics are mutually entangled.

2  This research included interviews with various Oromo elders, legal experts and gadaa leaders, as well as observations and filming of gadaa events among the Tuulama-Oromo of East Shewa. I have also made some shorter fieldtrips to the Macca, Arsii, Gujii, and Boorana areas. I am indebted to Firoomsa Kabbada, Hangaasuu Rooba, and Addunyaa Hirphoo for their help in filming, transcribing and conducting interviews.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

149

1.1  What Is Democracy? Political Model, Utopia, or the ‘Vernacular’? Democracy, commonly defined as “the rule of the people” (Birch 1993, p. 47), has a multi-layered history of political and philosophical engagement. Some theorists have provided us with a list of ‘traits’, or set of identifiers, that would qualify a given governmental system to be called democratic. Among these are elected officials, fair elections, freedom of expression and the right to form independent political parties (Dahl 1989, p. 120, p. 233). Other theorists more generally emphasise equality (Vernon 2001, p. 42), or at least equal opportunity (Wallach 2018, p. 146), agency (O’Donnell 2010, p.  25, pp.  31–40) and opportunities of participation (Birch 1993, p. 81) for all citizens. Most of these descriptions are rather abstract concepts of political philosophy and appear to be ideals rather than actual representations of any ‘living’ political systems. Hence, growing critique has arisen as to whether democracy is a ‘real thing’ at all.3 Yet, despite all the critique, democracy remains a powerful concept. For its proponents, it epitomises political ideals that should be pursued against all impediments (Vernon 2001, p. 10). The ideal stands for a hope, or promise, yet to come true, of “democracy to come” (Derrida 1994, p. 81). In consequence, the discourse of democracy has become largely disentangled from the specific organisational structures of any particular state polities (Verdery 1996, p. 105). It has become a more general, abstract idea, that may be understood as a representation of “political morality” (Vernon 2001, p. 35) and “virtue” (Wallach 2018, p. 176). From its very discursive beginnings, it had been framed as an adversary and reverse image of “tyranny” (Teegarden 2014, p.  9). The call for democratic renewal, consequently, was understood “as a mode of making insurrectionary claims against domination” (Barnett 2017, p. 25). The figure of the ‘tyrant’ thus incorporated political antagonism as such, representing the ‘political Other’. As a reverse image of tyranny, democracy appears on the ‘bright side’, as a positive counterpart to illegitimate rule, carrying the reputation of political legitimacy (Wallach 2018, p.  186, p.  221). The term ‘democracy’ became a political icon, a placeholder for the ‘good and righteous’ (cf. Svensson 1995, p. 1). It is open to being filled with different meanings and political agendas (cf. Shapiro and Hacker-Cordón 1999, 3  For the varying substantiations of such critique, see for example Green (2014, p. 100), Runciman (2018, p. 2) and Wolin (2008, p. 43).

150 

A. NICOLAS

p. 1) and may therefore be invoked by even avowed political opponents (Paley 2002, pp. 475–476). It is the contention of this chapter that gadaa, the Oromo age- and generation organisation, has a similar role in Oromo nationalist contexts and fulfils the same functions as democratic discourse. Gadaa once constituted an independent governmental organisation for different Oromo groups in Northeast Africa, before British colonial rule in Kenya and the expansion of the Abyssinian state in Ethiopia. To Oromo nationalists it would signify a past time, and future promise, of national self-­determination. Gadaa became a core symbol of Oromo identity, as well as of resistance. Its ‘tyrant Other’ was, above all, imperial and Ethiopian state domination, as controlled by other ethnic groups.4 Gadaa thus evolved into a “democratic counter-model” (Zitelmann 1994, p. 74). As has been the case with democracy, the discourse on gadaa over time increasingly became disengaged from previous organisational structures that once formed its base. Gadaa has gone beyond traditional forms of age- and generation stratification, or any concrete practices of traditional decision-making. It has become a more abstract, philosophical concept and political ideal. For many Oromo it has come to stand for the ‘good and the righteous’, just as ‘democracy’ did in other contexts. Gadaa has grown into a “national icon” (Legesse 2006). This profoundly positive connotation and openness, which can be filled with quite different political visions and personnel staffing, has made both concepts attractive to different political actors in and outside Ethiopia, including, again, political adversaries. Both gadaa and democracy can be seen as culturally specific forms of social and symbolic capital (cf. Bourdieu 1986). Both have ‘gone’ international, albeit in different ways. They became valuable assets, a ‘political currency’ that political actors would genuinely compete for. At the base of this contest is a power struggle about legitimate political authority.

4  Meant are here in particular the Amhara and the Tigray, though state dominance would also include socialist rulers who deliberately downplayed the significance of ethnic belonging. The fact that many Oromo also participated as ‘gunmen’ (naftanya) in the military expansion and served in the administrative structure of the Abyssinian empire and later Ethiopian state, still figures as a sensitive issue in Oromo identity discourse (cf. Lewis 1996, p. 42).

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

151

2   The Ethiopian Experience: The ‘Coming of Democracy’ and ‘Rebirth of Tradition’ When in 1991 an alliance of opposition forces, led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), defeated the former socialist Derg regime, Ethiopia became a federal state. The country was divided into large, ethnically defined regional states, and was ruled by the alliance of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).5 The TPLF had prepared itself for a break-up with some of their former allies, like the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF),6 soon after the takeover of power. The party had initiated, partly among prisoners of war, the foundation of a number of other ethnic parties, most of which carried the token PDO (standing for ‘People’s Democratic Organisation’) in their names (Shongolo 1996, p. 266), and were partners of the TPLF (Clapham 2017, p. 78; Fisher and Tsehaye 2019, pp. 196–197). The Oromo ‘ethnic ally’ of the TPLF was the Oromo Peoples’ Democratic Organization (OPDO).7 It soon came to rule over the new Oromiyaa regional state. The OPDO introduced a new policy of promoting the Oromo language and cultural heritage in Oromiyaa (cf. Lewis 1996, p. 44). Its aim was to gain widespread support among the local Oromo population, and to outdo the party’s imminent rival, the OLF. The OLF at that time had become an official enemy of the EPRDF government.8 The EPRDF government had ambitious plans for Ethiopia’s development, but largely depended on international aid. The fact that political, military, and financial support of the international community was conditional, bound to the promise of ‘democratising’ their political and legal structures, had a strong impact on Ethiopian government rhetoric, to whom the critical diaspora and growing internal opposition was a major concern. The rhetoric of democracy in public political discourse was therefore heavily invoked (Donham 2012, p. 260). The idea of ‘democracy’ had a remarkable career over these times. Under socialist Derg rule, it was understood according to the Leninist principle of “democratic centralism” (Clapham 1988, p. 9); under EPRDF  In Oromo: Adda Dimokraatawaa Warraaqsa Uummatoota Itiyophiyaa (ADWUI).  In Oromo: Adda Bilisummaa Oromoo (ABO). 7  In Oromo: Dhaabbata Dimokraatawaa Uummata Oromoo (Dh.D.U.O.). 8  The OLF then went underground or abroad, upholding armed resistance in parts of Ethiopia and neighbouring countries through its military wing, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA); in Oromo: Waraana Bilisummaa Oromoo (WBO). 5 6

152 

A. NICOLAS

rule it grew into a “revolutionary democracy”, marked by “vanguard party rule” in the Marxist-Leninist tradition (Hagmann and Abbink 2013, p. 1, 4). To the outside world, the Marxist image was often purposefully played down, though. EPRDF’s presentation of Ethiopia was that of a “developmental state” (Hagmann and Abbink 2013, p. 7; Vaughan 2015, p. 306), with large-scale economic programs under way, which would in fact suit both socialist development ideologies and ideas of capital investment. While opposition groups and human rights organisations continued to complain about human rights violations in Ethiopia, “the constitution, multi-party democracy and the electoral process” were “presented as founding myths” of the contemporary Ethiopian state (Bach 2013, p. 65), implying in their rhetoric ideals compatible with those of ‘liberal democracy’.9 2.1  Culture/Tradition as Capital After the death of long-standing Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in 2012, and the resignation of his successor Hailemariam Desalegn in February 2018, a new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, was appointed (Fisher and Tsehaye 2019, p. 194, p. 198). He represented the former OPDO, which then became the ODP, that is, the Oromo party of the government coalition. Following his inauguration in April 2018, Abiy Ahmed started a reform program that included the release of political prisoners, readmittance of opposition parties and a peace treaty with neighbouring Eritrea (BBC Africa 2019). In September 2019, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Noticeably, Abiy Ahmed is known for his favouring of including traditional authorities as “social capital” into state governance (Ahmed 2017a, p. 12).10 His stance builds on a long-term strategy that has steadily been

9  Ethiopia managed, despite its dependence on international aid, to successfully negotiate its role towards foreign engagement in its policies. At the same time that it was a “security partner of Western and Middle Eastern countries” the steadily intensifying “relations with China and India (the largest foreign investors in Ethiopia)” (Abbink 2017, p. 148; italics removed) offered alternative political options. 10  In 2017, Abiy Ahmed submitted his PhD thesis on the topic of “Social Capital and Its Role in Traditional Conflict Resolution in Ethiopia” (2017b) to the newly founded Peace and Security Center of Addis Ababa University.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

153

developed in Ethiopia since 1991.11 The aim of the new state’s cultural policy was to integrate traditional authorities and institutions into government policies, campaigns, and into local legal and administrative tasks.12 Alliances with local partners of renowned integrity were seen as useful means to secure pacification and stability in the country. A whole branch of the applied sciences at Ethiopian universities and research departments, since the 1990s and especially the 2000s, became dedicated to the utilisation of traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution in a state framework (cf. Dea 2012, p. 92; Hailu et al. 2008). In the political sphere, the activation of traditional authorities and governance structures for support of government policies and campaigns, public administration, and also elections, was pursued (Dea 2012, p. 93, p. 105; Hagmann 2012, p. 62).13 Efforts at including, alongside religion, ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ through state agencies meanwhile have set in all over Ethiopia (cf. Hagmann 2012, p.  62; Østebø 2012), although perhaps with varying local impacts (cf. Watson 2009, p.  181). The rapprochement to tradition by government parties was partly a long-term strategic identity policy, partly also a reaction to political competition. The OPDO/ODP in Oromiyaa region had to compete and defend its access to popular vote and opinion, especially against its long-standing rival, the OLF. The Ethiopian Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MCT) plays an important role in the ideologisation and utilisation of ‘culture’. The ministry runs offices in each of the different ethnic-federal regions that are targeted at specific ethnic groups. For the Oromiyaa region, the Oromiyaa Culture and Tourism Bureau (OCTB) is responsible.14 In 2000, the government established the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH), working under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (RL 2016, p. 7). Representatives of the OCTB are involved in 11  For members of some smaller ethnic groups in Ethiopia, who often have no lobby in government politics, the situation does significantly differ from that of ethnic majorities in the country. See, for instance, Fratkin (2014). 12  Previous governments in Ethiopia also integrated chosen traditional authorities and institutions into their governing schemes (Mains 2012, p. 150; Østebø 2012, p. 170) but the degree to which this would become an official policy and public ideology, substantially intensified after 1991. 13  At the same time, previous governments’ policies to ‘folklorise’ local traditions were continued, to strengthen the touristic sector (see the Ethiopian “Tourism Master Plan”, Ministry of Culture and Tourism 2015). 14  In Oromo: Biiroo Aadaafi Tuurizimii Oromiyaa (B.A.T.O.).

154 

A. NICOLAS

almost all important local ethnic-cultural events in Oromiyaa. They work alongside government administrators and, especially during events of national importance of a potentially ‘explosive’ nature, members of the intelligence services. State agents jointly pursue new policies of ‘public cultural relations’, targeting ‘desirable’ scholarly and media representations, while actively disapproving of ‘non-favourable’ images. This is particularly true for the gadaa organisation, as a core symbol of Oromo national identity.

3   Gadaa Governance: The Tuulama Example The Tuulama, who are the main focus of this chapter, occupy the central parts of Oromiyaa Region, neighbouring the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa (in Oromo: Finfinnee). Their most widely known gadaa assembly place is at Odaa Nabee, not far from Duukam town. The Tuulama consider themselves as descendants of the Boorana-Oromo. The latter were pastoralists who migrated into the territory in the sixteenth century from southern Ethiopia (Hassen 1990, pp. 22–27). The Tuulama gadaa organisation, like that of other Oromo groups in Ethiopia, therefore, traces itself back to the gadaa organisation of the Boorana, who still enjoy a high symbolic esteem and a senior status in Oromo clan- and lineage ties.15 The Tuulama practice a gadaa system that still greatly resembles that of the Boorana but has also developed its own traits.16 All males are members of one of the five gadaa classes (gadaa shanan) of the area: Rooballee, Birmajii, Meelbaa, Michillee, and Duuloo.17 This group affiliation is passed from a father to all his sons. The members of any of these classes collectively pass a generational age-grading, each stage lasting eight years. Ideally, this should correspond to the actual age of the group members, that is, ittimakoo should be small boys, dabballee boys or youths, foollee young men, qondaala the junior adults preparing themselves to take over power in society, gadaa the adult men at the peak of their power, and yuuba the elders who have retired from the political power of gadaa but who still advise their juniors. Power over the country is exercised by the 15  Descriptions about the Boorana Oromo’s gadaa system can be found, for example, in Bassi (2005, 1996) Baxter (1978), Legesse (2006, 1973), Leus (2006), and Nicolas (2013). 16  Further material on the Tuulama gadaa organisation can be found in Arnesen (1996), Blackhurst (1978), Haberland (1963), Hayilee (2007), Knutsson (1967), Lepisa (1975), Nicolas (2006), and Soorii (2016). 17  There are alternative names for these five groups.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

155

members of the same cohort during the eight-year long period when their set is the stage of gadaa. The members of each cohort are led by a number of title holders that are called abbaa bokkuu (‘fathers of the sceptre’) and hayyuu. Their positions are tied to their lineage. Each of the various lineages have, for any of these offices, and for each of the five gadaa classes, five different families in which the position is passed on from father to (eldest) son. During the period of gadaa, which gave the entire eponymous system its name, the members of the generation-set in power regularly meet at regional assembly places, in order to make political and legislative decisions, settle conflicts, proclaim traditional law, and perform rituals for the well-being of the country. Gadaa rule thus changes every eight years. This is done by means of a fixed order of succession prescribing who has to hand over power to whom, and when. Rooballee always hand over power to Birmajii, Birmajii to Meelbaa, Meelbaa to Michillee, Michillee to Duuloo and Duuloo back to Rooballee. At the time one class passes the gadaa stage, the following class enters the stage of qondaala, while the next enters the stage of foollee, so that no two classes can ever be gadaa at the same time, and thus do not compete for power.18 The rules to leave the decision-making assemblies and quit power after the eight-year-long gadaa period ends are very strict. No one can negotiate to stay in office longer and the members of the next generational set are already waiting to be installed into their positions. This is done during large, regional rituals for the handing-over of power, and followed by circumcision and retirement-feasts of the previous powerholders. 3.1  Gap or Continuity? During the times of the Shewan kings, and particularly under emperor Menelik II (1889–1913), who vastly expanded the borders of his state, the Tuulama territories of today’s East Shewa became part of the Shewan state, and the Oromo inhabitants were converted to Orthodox Christianity (Tafla 1987, p. 689; cf. Arnesen 1996; Ege 1996). After he incorporated the then Oromo-territories into the expanding Abyssinian empire in the 18  Although the belonging to one of the five gadaa classes is hereditary in the family line, gadaa class membership is not identical with the patrilineage. Rather, each lineage has its members apportioned to all five gadaa gadaa classes. This way, whenever any of the gadaa classes is in power, the lineage has some representatives in it.

156 

A. NICOLAS

Fig. 1  First gadaa bureau of the Tuulama, a rented office space. Bishooftuu town (Debre Zeyt), East Shewa (Oromiyaa), July 2008. (Photo by the author)

late nineteenth century, gadaa lost its prominence as an uncontested governmental authority. It became subordinate to state hierarchies, a situation that lasted beyond the times of socialist rule over Ethiopia, until 1991. Today’s Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa was founded by the emperor within Oromo territory near a village called Finfinnee. It was founded on the borders of the Ethiopian highlands to maintain control of the newly conquered territories (Garretson 2000, p. 8). The Tuulama-Oromo of Shewa found themselves within the new centre of the imperial state, and many would be integrated into state military and administrative structures. At present, in the rural areas of East Shewa, the Oromo live well along with a significant Amhara population. Intermarriage is common, and many Oromo speak Amharic fluently as their mother tongue. Since the time of state incorporation, the Tuulama have thus had to deal with an ambiguous identificatory heritage: on the one hand, they would, due to historical entanglements with the Amhara-dominated central state, sometimes face mistrust by Oromo from other regions. On the other hand, there is an historical narrative among the Oromo of East Shewa of illegitimate

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

157

Abyssinian (Amhara or Tigrayian) domination and current emphasis on their Oromo identity. The annual irreecha festival at Hora Arsadii, a lake in Bishooftuu town (also known as Debre Zeyt), has become a symbol of Oromo identity beyond East Shewa. 3.2  A ‘Bureaucratic Revolution’ Since 1991, when the new government took power in Ethiopia, an impressive revival of the gadaa institution could be observed among the Tuulama. All over the region, traditional assemblies and rituals were carried out again under much publicity. When I observed the rituals and assemblies of the generation-set of Rooballee at Odaa Nabee in 2001, there was much will and effort made to ‘correctly’ reconstruct old gadaa rules and ceremonies. Elders and hereditary gadaa title holders were asked for advice and participation in the events. At the same time, new media attendance and additional elements, like theatre performance of local high school groups, grew. All major gadaa events were closely observed by state security agencies. The developments foreshadowed a process of change in gadaa that in the coming years would intensify. In 2008, I noticed still further impacts of state involvement in the functioning of gadaa. The new ethno-regional government of the federal Oromiyaa region had decided to financially and logistically support the preserving of Oromo language and culture. Therefore, new material input and encouragement of institutional activity was provided to gadaa. A process of bureaucratisation was set in motion that saw the installation of ‘gadaa bureaus’ and offices with relevant equipment (such as computers, printers, television sets, DVD players, and partly also secretaries and paid assistants), where gadaa leaders and elders could gather and be consulted by the local population. For the Tuulama, their administrative office was set up in Bishooftuu town (i.e. Debre Zeyt). The office was variously called the “gadaa bureau of the Tuulama” (biiroo gadaa Tuulamaa), “bureau of the three Tuulama [lineages]” (biiroo Tuulama Sadeen), or “bureau of the Abbaa Gadaa” (biiroo abbaa gadaa). In the beginning, the location of the office was switched several times. First, it was a hired office space in a second-floor building in Bishooftuu, with a doorplate at its entrance, and office space inside, including a separate room for the “father of gadaa” (abbaa gadaa). Elders who were willing to cooperate were often invited here to council and deliberate about the planning of gadaa events and irreecha festivities

158 

A. NICOLAS

Fig. 2  Construction of new gadaa centre (galma gadaa) in Bishooftuu town (Debre Zeyt), East Shewa (Oromiyaa), June 2011. The compound has a generous outlay, with open-air spaces and room for several office buildings. (Photo by the author)

at Hora Arsadii. Later, the bureau was moved to a larger compound next to lake Arsedii, dedicated as galma to the gadaa.19 The new space was a fenced compound with a building inside that could be used as a more spacious office building. Later on, the site was changed again: the ‘seat’ of gadaa moved to a large compound at the town’s major road to Addis Ababa (Finfinnee). This new site, too, was provided by the state to the gadaa to be used as “galma [of] gadaa”. It was larger than the previous spots. Next to an office building it would also contain newly erected round huts with thatched roofs in a traditional style. The spacious compound also allowed for ceremonies and meetings of larger groups of people inside of it. In the compound, a large, idealised sculpture of an abbaa gadaa and his wife was 19  The Oromo term galma is usually used in the Tuulama area for temples or holy spaces. This terminology implied a ritual or religious purpose for the new buildings at the gadaa sites, though their function mainly was of an administrative nature.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

159

Fig. 3  Gadaa statue in an urban centre. East Shewa (Oromiyaa), July 2011. (Photo by Lise Rangnes)

erected, both equipped with ‘traditional items’. In that compound, various meetings and ceremonies would be held in the years to follow, such as a Wal-harka fudhinsa (or ‘hand-taking’) ceremony between abbaa gadaa of Rooballee, Naggasa Nagaa’oo, and his successor Bayyanaa Sanbatuu, abbaa gadaa of Birmajii, in October 2010, or the public acknowledgement of the new kuusaa, the leaders of the newly incoming foollee generation, in April 2011 by Bayyanaa Sanbatuu.

4   Introduction of Leadership: The Position of Abbaa Gadaa In the aftermath of the 2001 general assembly of his group of Rooballee at Odaa Nabee, Naggasa Nagaa’oo became abbaa gadaa of the generation-­ set of Rooballee. From that point he represented the whole Tuulama group towards the outer world. During his term in office, he travelled throughout the country, participating in workshops, searching for information on Oromo culture and history, in East Shewa as well as in other

160 

A. NICOLAS

Oromo regions, networking with other abbaa gadaa and cultural activists and government representatives all over Oromiyaa. In 2008, he travelled several times to the Arsii region to settle disputes there, since in that area, a considerable population of Shewa Oromo live among the Arsii-Oromo. As the Tuulama representative, he also repeatedly visited the western areas of the Macca-Oromo, with whom the Tuulama have close ties but a historically complicated relationship.20 Meanwhile, Naggasa Nagaa’oo was conferred the title of ‘Abbaa Gadaa of the Tuulama’ (abbaa gadaa Tuulamaa).21 The nomination of a single leader as abbaa gadaa among the Tuulama was a post-1991 innovation. The Tuulama elders and law experts that I interviewed knew of no tradition of a single leader amongst them.22 Rather, the term abbaa gadaa was collectively used either for all members of a certain generation class or for the group of titleholders amongst them, but not for a single individual.23 The institution developed in the 2000s of the Tuulama nominating an abbaa gadaa as highest leader was in fact an innovation copied from the Boorana. Naggasa Nagaa’oo had himself travelled several times to the Boorana region in Southern Ethiopia to get information about the functioning of gadaa there and to buy ‘cultural items’ (meeshaa aadaa) for his own attirement and for a museum collection. In 2004, he then participated in the Gumii Gaayyoo assembly of the Boorana, as official abbaa gadaa representative of the Tuulama.

20  Naggasa Nagaa’oo also had close contact with Aagaa Xeenxanoo, former abbaa gadaa of the Gujii-Oromo, and with Hajjii Mormor, the abbaa gadaa of Hararghe area, as well as with Jaldeessa Liiban, at the time abbaa gadaa of the Boorana-Oromo. They were jointly involved in establishing a network of abbaa gadaa from different regions of Oromiyaa under the guidance of the Oromiyaa Culture and Tourism Bureau. 21  The position was also called ‘Abbaa Gadaa of the Three Tuulama [lineages]’ (abbaa gadaa Sadeen Tuulama). 22  It is known though from oral history that every eight years in their ritual cycle the Tuulama formerly used to send delegates from their generation classes on pilgrimage to the abbaa muudaa (the ‘father of anointment’) of the Boorana, as the Boorana were senior to them (Haberland 1963, p. 542; cf. Hassen 1990, pp. 7–9). 23   More common in discourse, anyway, was the plural form ‘fathers of gadaa’ (abbooti gadaa).

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

161

Fig. 4  Gadaa assembly at Odaa Nabee. Odaa Nabee, East Shewa (Oromiyaa), June 2017. Members of the gadaa of Meelbaa hold their assembly next to Meelbaa’s odaa tree. (Photo by the author)

4.1  The Founding of the Abbaa Gadaa Council In July 2014, the ‘Council of Oromo Abbaa Gadaa’s’ (Gumii Abbooti Gadaa Oromoo)24 held its founding congress in Bishooftuu (Debre Zeyt) town in East Shewa (Milkessa Midega 2017, p. 173; cf. Finfinne Tribune 2014a). The organisation aimed at unifying the hitherto independent gadaa assemblies of the different Oromo groups of Oromiyaa under a common leadership. The official founding of the council, which had been preceded by years of preparatory meetings and mutual visits among abbaa gadaa of different Oromo groups (Midega 2017, pp. 168–169, p. 174), had been realised under the auspices of the Bureau of Culture and Tourism of Oromiyaa (TVO News 2014). According to official announcements, the new organisation comprised of “all the Abbaa Gadaa’s across Oromia”, 24  Later, before its most recent 2019 renaming, it was also referred to as the ‘Unity Council’ or ‘National Council of Oromo Abbaa Gadaa’s’ (Gumii Tokkummaa Abbooti Gadaa Oromoo).

162 

A. NICOLAS

and planned “to coordinate the revival and restoration of the Gadaa System in Oromia” (Finfinne Tribune 2014a). The new chairman of the Abbaa Gadaa’s Council was Bayyanaa Sanbatuu, at that time abbaa gadaa of the Birmajii generation-set of the Tuulama in East Shewa. He lived in Bishooftuu town, where the new Abbaa Gadaa’s Council also had its seat. The choice of place and leadership position carried messages of conflicting allegiances: in the symbolic hierarchy of the Oromo clan and lineage organisation, the Boorana of southern Ethiopia are senior to the Tuulama and several other groups to whom the Boorana gadaa system is considered their paragon and prototype. In the newly designed administrative pan-gadaa structure, though, older seniority stratifications were suspended. Leadership was assigned to the Tuulama. The centre of governance was placed in central Ethiopia. It is noteworthy that the Shewa region had already played an important role for centralised government in imperial and socialist times. It was not until 2019 that an abba gadaa of Gujii—a southern Oromo group with whom the Boorana repeatedly have been in confrontation—would become chairman of the organisation (BBC Oromo 2019b). The Abbaa Gadaa’s Council was deeply involved in the local gadaa assembly organisation, with continued input from willing local elders but was actually an apparatus of its own, with an independent organisational schedule and administrative apparatus (cf. Midega 2017). Financed and provided with the essential goods, landmarks and equipment, by the Ethiopian state the Abbaa Gadaa’s Council operated under government directives. In September 2008, in the southern Boorana region, I heard about some discontent among Boorana that their current abbaa gadaa had become an OPDO member. Critics were worried that their gadaa organisation would get co-opted by the state. Some days later, further north, I met several abbaa gadaa from different regions, among them the abba gadaa of Tuulama, from Hararghe, and of Boorana, in Shaashamannee town. They attended there the fifth party congress of the Oromiyaa government party OPDO. People on the streets speculated that most, if not all, ruling abbaa gadaa of the different regions of Oromiyaa were, or had become, OPDO members.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

163

5   Intangible Heritage The government soon became directly involved in organising gadaa activities. They organised gadaa assemblies in conjunction with gadaa leaders and elders and sent cars with drivers for them to attend governmental political meetings and workshops. Individual elders and gadaa members began leaving the local sphere and moved on to be candidates for positions in the government’s regional or state representations. In 2016, the government of Ethiopia then succeeded in its efforts to make gadaa part of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO 2016a). The application statement was prepared by the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH), in partnership with the Oromiyaa Culture and Tourism Bureau (OCTB), and was officially supported by Bayyanaa Sanbatuu in his function as “Abaa Gada of Tulama Clan and Chairman of the National Council of Oromo Abaa Gadas” (RL 2016, p. 10, p. 12).25 Next to international recognition and high prestige, the listing offered the possibility to obtain financial assistance from UNESCO for the “creation and operation of infrastructures”, as well as for “capacity building” and “standard-setting” (UNESCO 2016b, 2003, pp. 7–9). For the future gadaa project, the Oromiyaa government set ambitious educational goals and plans for structurally upgrading the traditional system.26 The successful UNESCO application in 2016 was widely celebrated in the official media channels of Oromiyaa in the days after the public announcement. 5.1   State Involvement and Material Impact Since the 2000s, the government has been increasingly putting efforts into building roads and providing transport to formerly remote gadaa ceremonial places. This made the journey easier for participants, and also 25  The new UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity element was registered under the name of “Gada system, an indigenous democratic socio-political system of the Oromo”, in Oromo: “Sirna Gadaa: Sirna Hawaas-Siyaasaa Dimokraatawaa Ummata Oromoo” (RL 2016, p. 1). 26  The Ethiopian government planned, for instance “[s]cholarly research”, “long term training sessions” for “custodians and the cultural representatives from the communities”, “[s]ymposiums, seminars and meetings organized to initiate dialogue between the young generation and practitioners”, mainstreaming gadaa “in the curriculum of the Oromiya region schools” and disseminating knowledge about it via “the Oromiya Radio and Television Station” (RL 2016, p. 8).

164 

A. NICOLAS

attracted more visitors, government officials, security agents, members of the press, political activists, curious bystanders, scholars and foreign observers to attend the meetings. Assembly participants now often opted for commuting, during the assemblies, between the ritual gathering places and nearby towns, where more comfortable provisions, such as hotels, restaurants and marketplaces could be found. Journeys to the assembly sites previously had a ritual connotation within the gadaa cycle. They used to be jointly organised by members of the same lineages, who on their way to the regional assemblies held joint rituals in holy places.27 This ‘cartography of pilgrimage’ depicted the Tuulama system as of lineage seniority.28 This important element, though, is vanishing. The modern roads take other routes and allow faster transport with the use of cars and buses. All over the territory, holy trees and ritual sites were fenced in the 2000s, and construction works at ritual sites were set in progress. The enclosure of holy trees helped to protect them from farming activities, grazing animals and new growing crowds of visitors but often dismissed the trees’ ritual functions. The tree of Odaa Nabee, for example, served as a site of prayer for individuals who ritually anointed the tree with butter, brought offerings, and hung pieces of cloth to its branches, for vowing or thanksgiving. By now, the odaa tree, along with several other trees around it, is surrounded by a fence and can only be accessed through a gate. When guards or public organisers begin to decide who is allowed, and for what purpose, to access a holy site, gatekeeping, in a most literal sense, becomes an issue. Building activities at gadaa ritual sites, however, are not confined to ordinary fencing. Entire compounds with solid walls and inside buildings are constructed by the government at various important ritual and assembly sites in the country. In 2008, all over East Shewa, meetings and preparations for the erection of ‘galmas’ for the gadaa, at diverse open-air clan- and lineage assembly places, were under way. Built directly at, or very close to, the old open-air ritual sites, these compounds were to contain 27  Gadaa is essentially a sociopolitical phenomenon but cannot be separated from ritual and religious activities. Gadaa governance is closely tied to various ritual duties, such as slaughtering of livestock, and is regularly accompanied by collective blessings and prayers to God/the sky and the earth (Nicolas 2006, pp. 172–175). 28  See also Schlee (1992), for the Gabbra. Among the Tuulama, the holders of ritual objects, the warra ulfaa, till these days are not allowed to take cars, or to cross rivers or bridges on their way. They have to travel on horse-back or on foot, and to take the old ‘pilgrimage’ routes.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

165

offices and assembly spaces. Government campaigns were initiated to raise money among local populations for the erection of the new galmas. At Odaa Nabee, a particularly large and prestigious galma project was envisaged by the planners. However, by 2008, problems had started to occur with regard to its implementation. Larger plots of land were needed for the planned new compound, and the local farmers were called in several times for meetings, also attended by the abbaa gadaa Naggasa Nagaa’oo. Government officials and newly appointed gadaa leaders tried to persuade the farmers to leave parts of their land to the construction site, but they replied that they were poor and could not dispense with any farming ground. So far, the project has not been realised at Odaa Nabee. Instead, an office in the nearby town of Duukam serves as a gadaa office (Debebe 2017, p. 67). Bound to the ambitious projects of materialising Oromo heritage were also national and international fundraising activities targeted at wealthy individuals, banks, economic enterprises, and international donors. In urban spaces, prestigious buildings were erected in the shape of traditional symbols. In Adaamaa city (also known as Nazret, or Nazareth), which served as the capital of Oromiyaa regional state between 2000 and 2005, an impressive building was constructed for the caffee Oromiyaa, the Oromiyaa parliament. It was said to symbolise in its architectural design, with five wings and separate entrances, the five gadaa groups.29 In similar vein, later, a large ‘Oromia Cultural Center’ was inaugurated in Addis Ababa (Finfinnee) in 2015 (Reinvent Ethiopia 2015). This site, too, is filled with architectural and artistic symbolisms and references to gadaa, like the reliefs of members of the different gadaa grades, and a large sculpture of an abbaa gadaa and his wife, the haadha gadaa (Mo’aa TV 2018), similar to that in Bishooftuu and numerous other places in Oromiyaa. Visual rhetorics also included larger-than-life-sized posters of current gadaa leaders at central spaces in towns and along major roads in the Oromiyaa region.

29  After protests caused the Oromiyaa central administration to move back to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa (Finfinnee) in 2005, the building in Adaamaa would be renamed the “Galma Abbaa Gadaa Conference Center” and used as a conference venue.

166 

A. NICOLAS

6   ‘Gadaa Democracy’: Re-Defining ‘Tradition’ In the substantiation for its UNESCO application, the Ethiopian government characterised the gadaa system as “an exemplary indigenous democracy from which all democratizing societies can learn” (RL 2016, p. 10). The organisers here took up a public discourse that had been massively propagated in Oromiyaa state over the previous years. In this discourse, deliberate recourse is made to the Western ‘democracy’ model. This ideal is said to be substantially embodied in the indigenous ‘gadaa democracy’ of the Oromo. A claim is made for the generation-set system to represent a genuine example for an ‘African democracy’ that is older, and perhaps even better, than its ‘Western’ counterparts in North America or Europe, and proponents assert that it chronologically precedes even antique Greek democracy. The five gadaa classes of the traditional generation system (i.e. Rooballee, Birmajii, Meelbaa, Michillee, and Duuloo, see above) are, in fact, interpreted as ‘political parties’ that represent the interests of all different parts of the population. Their order of succession, so the evolving interpretation, ensured democratic power change: where the US elected their president every four years, the Oromo did so every eight years. Hence, so the argumentation, gadaa is not as prone to ‘dictatorship’ as the governmental institutions of other African ethnic neighbours and competitors, who were historically organised in kingdoms. Previous studies by historians and anthropologists that had postulated a polar divide in patterns of social organisation—between hierarchically organised societies with kingdoms on the one hand, and egalitarian societies (Levine 2000, pp. 72–79) like the one of the Oromo on the other—delivered the blueprint for this new ‘reading’ of traditional institutional models. They would later directly invoke the terminology of democracy, drawing parallels between “Oromo democracy” (Bassi 1996, p. 159; Legesse 2006, p. 1) and the antique Athenian legacy.30 The scholarly discourses, that from early on had been entangled in histories of Oromo political opposition and exile, left their imprints on the collective consciousness of Oromo national identity. The ideas found their way back into public discourse and shaped both critical philosophies of political dissidents and official government ideology.

30  Some scholars, in contrast, have characterised gadaa as a form of “gerontocracy” (Aguilar 1998, p. 258).

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

167

Gadaa descriptions, in such contexts, regularly emphasise that leaders are ‘elected’ according to their knowledge and skills and reflect the ‘Western’ notion of ‘democratic elections’. The selection and assignment of gadaa leadership positions, however, is a more complex procedure. Among the Tuulama, most titles and offices of the gadaa cycle, like hayyuu and abbaa bokkuu, who act as councillors and judges, are hereditary positions. They are assigned according to the principle of male primogeniture, that is, positions are inherited by the eldest-born sons from their fathers. Recently, efforts were made by the government to structurally implement a new election procedure into assembly proceedings of the gadaa. During their 2017 assembly at Odaa Nabee, the members of the Meelbaa generation-­set were instructed to hold elections of their future abbaa gadaa. The new procedure provided that each local administrative district, called aanaa, should nominate a certain number of representatives and have them vote for a leader from among the suggested candidates.31 During the announcement at Odaa Nabee, a hayyuu from Jille protested that the voters should not be nominated through the aanaa but be sent by the Tuulama lineages, but he was overruled by the meeting’s spokesmen. Whether the new election procedures were subsequently actually applied, remains uncertain. In September 2018, in any case, a new abbaa gadaa was chosen among the Tuulama. A handover ceremony was organised, in which Bayyanaa Sanbatuu of the generation-set of Birmajii handed over his function as abbaa gadaa to Goobanaa Hoolaa of Meelbaa (BBC Oromo 2018). 6.1  Transmitting and Teaching ‘Gadaa’ Cultural activists, government agents and individual gadaa leaders work together to translate a complex organisational web of local and regional practices into a ‘compressed format’ which is suitable for media transmission and the education of current and future citizens. In that vein, a process of ‘writing-down’ the living gadaa system in cultural journals, books and newspaper articles also began.32 Emphasis was given to the homogenisation of the previously regionally different variants of the gadaa system. At the same time, an inversion of roles took place: where previously 31  The aanaa are state administrative units run by government officials. It is highly likely that they would promote government-friendly delegates for the voting. 32  See, for example, Hayilee (2007) and Soorii (2016).

168 

A. NICOLAS

anthropological work had relied on learning from elders and gadaa leaders, now the position of ‘teachers’ and ‘learners’ changed. Elders and gadaa leaders began to attend workshops, where government anthropologists would teach them about Oromo culture. In 2017, for instance, during the ceremonies of the Meelbaa set at Odaa Nabee, proceedings at the ritual site were halted one day. Participants were brought by government-­ provided buses to the nearby town of Duukam, where they received introductory teachings by OCTO representatives and anthropologists. In PowerPoint presentations, the government experts explained to the gathered gadaa how the gadaa system was supposed to work. The Boorana system thereby served as major source of information, with which the local system of the Tuulama was synchronised. Ethiopian media channels, such as Oromiyaa radio and television broadcasts, regularly feature special programmes on Oromo cultural events and on gadaa.33 In these programmes, special broadcasts are transmitted on occasions of regional gadaa events, and Oromo elders and gadaa leaders are interviewed. Filming and broadcasting of gadaa rituals and assemblies that were formerly shielded from an uninitiated public now give a wider audience all over the country the impression that they were with the acting gadaa at these events and were sharing the ritual experience.

7   Gadaa as a ‘National Icon’ The old system had clear rules regarding gadaa belonging: those who do not attend the gadaa assemblies are not participants, and those who do not give their retirement feast at the end of the period of rule of their generation-set would drop out of the system once and for all, along with their future descendants. The retirement feasts of fathers at the same time initiate their sons as their successors into the gadaa system. Failure to provide the feast thus results in non-membership of the subsequent generation. Participation in generation-set rituals, more generally, takes effect in sealing and confirming gadaa membership. It is connected to the conferral of specific rights and duties within the organisation. Many Oromo who today feel connected to gadaa and consider it as part of their own 33  The government, in 2016, especially acknowledged the following media as their communication channels: “Oromiya Radio and Television (ORTV), Ethiopian Broadcast Corporation, Fana and Sheger FM both in Oromo and Amharic languages and […] various newspapers” (RL 2016, p. 11).

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

169

cultural heritage are, in fact, no longer members of the gadaa organisation. In particular, people in towns and urban spaces often no longer know their own gadaa affiliation and have not participated in any gadaa gatherings. Since neither their fathers nor they themselves have given their gadaa feasts as the law would require, they are de facto and de jure no longer part of ‘the system’. Gadaa, in such contexts, has a different meaning from the ‘living organisation’ of practicing members. Yet, it remains a powerful ideal and mobilising force for identity building. Among the rural population, the ‘minimum requirement’ of family fathers giving their gadaa feasts is kept more widely, and young men may learn from local elders about gadaa. However, in the countryside, traditional knowledge is also distributed unevenly. Many young people—just like anthropologists—search for the ‘correct functioning’ of the gadaa organisation. Often, they are students of high schools and colleges in nearby towns. A new generation, in the Mannheimian sense, is growing up amongst the youth and developing a different approach to gadaa than former generations, much more focused on political demands and a quest for national identity. Their elders, on the one hand, are often pleased by their interest and appreciation of knowledge about the past. On the other hand, they may also feel that the young people are aspiring to something rather different from their own memories and experiences. 7.1  Gadaa and Political Dissent The gadaa system is of major symbolic significance to many Oromo dissidents. This is particularly true for the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) (Pausewang et al. 2002, p. 4; Zitelmann 1994, p. 74), the Oromo government party’s most immediate opponent and rival, which has had to go underground or into exile in the past. At the bottom line of the parties’ dispute lies a competition for the right to represent the “Oromo nation” (Zitelmann 1994, p. 87). So far, the OPDO/ODP has had the strategic advantage of controlling resources, finances, and being publicly on-site at gadaa events. This is also why the national political struggle via the internet and other media has become so vital to all parties: for the opposition in the diaspora, like North America, Australia and Europe, they were major means to reach out for supporters in Ethiopia. With the return from exile of several opposition leaders and broadcast networks in 2018 to Ethiopia (PRI 2018), a new situation has arisen that brings the struggle ‘back home’.

170 

A. NICOLAS

In addition, the rebelling youth and student protesters that in recent years have shattered government control in Oromiyaa have strong attachments to the Oromo ‘national quest’. The upheavals were partly due to economic problems and large-scale unemployment, particularly among the young educated and the urban youth (Mains 2012, p. 139, p. 142), but also had a strong ethno-national and political message. Road blockades, demonstrations and uprisings were followed by mass arrests through government forces (Mains 2012, p. 137, p. 149). They deeply affected, alongside many other parts of the country, East Shewa (The Guardian 2018).34 Many of the Oromo youth protesters called themselves qeerroo, a term that previously had designated among some Oromo groups the young men and fighters that formed part of the gadaa system.35 The term is historically closely associated with warfare or fighting (Hassen 2015, pp. 239–240). The movements’ link to a symbolism of fighting is certainly not coincidental—after all, the movement understands itself as a generation of uprisal. For proponents of violent nationalist struggle, they may be perceived as the “vanguard of the Oromo revolution” (Debela, quoted in The Guardian 2018), while for objectors they are seen as a “threat” (Africanews 2019), a youth generation out of control (cf. Mains 2012, p. 137).36 In the aftermath of the 2018 changes in government policies, politicians and scholars began discussing the place of qeerroo in society as

34  Protesters demanded, for example, the release of political prisoners and uncompromised elections. They also objected the moving of the Oromiyaa capital from Addis Ababa (Finfinnee) to Adaamaa, and particularly the Addis Ababa Master plan, both decisions later being revoked by the government, the first in 2005 and the latter in 2016, due to the ongoing protests (BBC Africa 2016). 35  The word qeerroo means “a young unmarried man” (Bitima 2000, p. 220), or “bachelor” (Leus 2006, p. 522). The name hints at its background as a youth and student movement (Daba 2019, p. 538) but also carries a clear national message, referring not simply to young Oromo but above all, to young Oromo. In Boorana society the status of being unmarried would be assigned to specific stages in the gadaa system, which also counted as warrior grades (Legesse 1973, p. 74; Leus 2006, p. 160, p. 547, p. 663). There is also a metaphorical association in contemporary usage of qeerransa (‘leopard’ or ‘tiger’, s. Bitima 2000, p. 220), as a “fast, furious and fortitude animal” (Daba 2019, p. 537). 36  There is an ongoing discussion about whether qeerroo are an organised group with ties to opposition forces, or whether the majority is rather a spontaneous mass of ‘rallying youths’. Both might actually apply. At least some of them also have formal structures of a political movement, such as Qeerroo Bilisummaa Oromoo, ‘The National Youth Movement for Freedom and Democracy’, founded in 2011 (QBO 2019).

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

171

well as in gadaa philosophy and structure.37 Is this a sign of political renewal and growing Oromo national unity, or merely an attempt at ‘re-­ integrating’ the qeerroo youth into established patterns of order, at calming the unrest? Recurrent violent incidents show that the situation is far from being settled yet. 7.2  New Developments The question of whether gadaa may serve as a calming factor in times of political turmoil, that the Ethiopian government hopes for, is not least a question of credibility of gadaa leaders. In 2016, when a tragic incident occurred during the irreecha ceremonies at Hora Arsadii in Bishooftuu, the authority of some gadaa officials was put to the test. During protests at the public celebrations, police fired tear gas into the crowd, and in the following panic numerous protesters died (The Guardian 2016). The escalation, notably, had occurred despite the former abbaa gadaa Naggasa Nagaa’oo trying to calm the protesters with prayers from the tribune where he and other Oromo cultural representatives had taken seats together with government officials (Lagatafo Studio 2016). The situation vividly showed that gadaa leaders who were close to the government could also get compromised. A danger of alienation between gadaa authorities and Oromo youth was imminent during the protests. For some of the other gadaa leaders, the previous months had already marked a turning point. In September 2016, members of the Abbaa Gadaa’s Council had formulated a joint declaration that openly criticised government policies and made political demands very similar to those of the protesters (A.G.C.  Statement 2016).38 Naggasa Nagaa’oo, having 37  Such proposals suggest, for instance, Oromiyaa state should “institute Gadaa System educational philosophy into their formal and non-formal programs” and “engage Qeerroos on action [and] reflection” (Tadesse 2019, p. 37). 38  The government had never previously hidden their stance with regard to political opposition, and even included in their UNESCO gadaa nomination a passage stating that the “federal government, the regional state government and the traditional Gada leaders are aware of the potential threat posed by groups who might want to exploit the element for personal interest or political purposes” and that they would draw up a plan “to create a mechanism that detects and arrests such trends through law enforcing agencies” (RL 2016, p. 8). The A.G.C. statement made a fundamental turn away from that. In an unprecedented tone which was critical of the government, it called upon “Oromo agents of the government” to “plead for forgiveness”, or otherwise be “held responsible for infringement of the

172 

A. NICOLAS

over the years been a prominent face of gadaa leadership in the public, disappeared from the media after the 2016 irreecha events. At the time, his successor and personal adversary Bayyanaa Sanbatuu had already begun to widen his sphere of influence and fields of activity as abbaa gadaa. He took his gadaa office ‘to the next level’: the international arena. He broadened his contacts to the Oromo in the diaspora— many of them being critics of the Ethiopian government. In September 2014, on the invitation of the Oromo Studies Association, Bayyanaa Sanbatuu went on a workshop tour through the USA. In his capacity as abbaa gadaa, he visited San Diego, Dallas, Minneapolis and Seattle, attending irreecha festivities in the diaspora and “focusing on the ongoing work of reviving the Gadaa system” (Jawar Mohammed, statement published in the Finfinne Tribune 2014b). Later, in June 2018, he also visited the Oromo diaspora in Bergen, Norway (Hero Channel 2018). In February 2019, Bayyanaa Sanbatuu, still in his function as chairman of the Council of Abbaa Gadaa’s, was also involved in the repatriation to Ethiopia of former fighting OLF members of the Oromo Liberation Army in Wallagga (Atoma 2019; BBC Oromo 2019a; RMN 2019). That these developments were even possible was due to a recent wind of change in Ethiopia. New prime minister Abiy Ahmed had led his party to a number of reforms. In September 2018, the OPDO renamed itself into Oromo Democratic Party (ODP)39 and replaced a number of its major personnel in leading positions (The East African 2018). The reformers clearly wanted to disassociate from previous EPRDF policies that had become highly unpopular among the population, and avoided former symbols of its ‘PDO’ past as TPLF ally.40 They removed any socialist emblems from the party logo, and instead prominently placed in it the black, red and white colours of the ‘gadaa flag’ and the flag of the Oromiyaa region (cf. Addis Standard 2018). This was a clear message of the ODP to distance itself from former Tigrayian rule over Ethiopia and to commit itself instead to an Oromo cause.41 The odaa tree, symbol of moral and ethical order laid down in the Gadaa rules of governance” (A.G.C.  Statement 2016, translation by the Oromian Economist). 39  In Oromo: Paartii Dimookraatawaa Oromoo. 40  Apparently, this is why the English abbreviation ODP was used also in Oromo language, instead of ‘PDO’. 41  The flag of Oromiyaa region has the colours red-white-black, with an odaa tree in its midst, and looks very similar to the black-red-white colours that commonly are interpreted as ‘colours of gadaa’. In the new ODP logo, the dove of peace was gone, as were the socialist

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

173

‘gadaa democracy’, remained central to ODP symbolism—it closely resembled the odaa tree in the flag of its rival party, the OLF. In April 2019, Bayyanaa Sanbatuu, former Tuulama abbaa gadaa and previous chairman of the Abbaa Gadaa’s Council, publicly raised criticism against the Oromiyaa Bureau of Culture and Tourism, stating that the bureau was interfering into gadaa affairs (VOA 2019). At a meeting in Asalla, the council was renamed an ‘organisation’, and changed its leadership.42 The new chairman is Jiloo Maandhoo, abbaa gadaa of the Gujii, the deputy chairman is Kuraa Jaarsoo, abbaa gadaa of the Boorana, and the secretary is Goobanaa Hoolaa, abbaa gadaa of the Tuulama (BBC Oromo 2019b). Bayyanaa Sanbatuu’s term as chairman was ended against his will, and it is likely that the internal power struggles had to do with new diverging political views and party loyalties among the gadaa leaders. In December 2019, the ODP together with other former EPRDF coalition partners founded the Prosperity Party. This new coalition party now replaced the former EPRDF government—this time, without the TPLF. Both government coalition and opposition parties by now are preparing for the upcoming elections in Ethiopia (originally scheduled for 2020 but so far postponed). For the ODP/Prosperity Party in Oromiyaa, it will mainly be run against other Oromo parties, especially against the OLF. In that arena, to win gadaa is to win the support of voters. There is competition among the different Oromo parties about who is ‘most near’ to the gadaa organisation and leadership, and who can thus count as the legitimate ‘political heir’ of gadaa.

8   Reformulating ‘African Democracy’: Renegotiating Definitional Power State reliance on traditional authorities is not new in Ethiopia, but new in the post-1991 development is certainly the extent and public celebration of this state rapprochement with tradition. The outcomes of the new developments after 2018 on the political landscape in Ethiopia are still difficult to assess but with the upcoming elections, appeals to ‘culture and

emblems of the cogwheel and the ear of grain (cf. Addis Standard 2018), which too closely had reminded of the TPLF and EPRDF emblems. 42  The association was now called the ‘Organisation of Oromo Abba Gadaa’s’ (Gamtaa Abootii Gadaa Oromoo).

174 

A. NICOLAS

tradition’, as symbolic markers of national identity and ethnic consciousness may intensify even further. For gadaa, much has changed over recent years. Open-air gatherings have been increasingly replaced by meetings in offices or hotel resorts; holy sites have become administrative centres, and ritual proceedings now need to be confirmed by protocols, stamps, and signatures. More important though than such apparent modifications are changes in leadership that go along with the countrywide reorganisation of gadaa. The government created a pan-gadaa association that brought hitherto decentralised Oromo groups, some of them former enemies, under a central administration. The Abbaa Gadaa’s Council was set above the different regional gadaa assemblies; its new organisational meta structure was placed on top of the existing organisational patterns. The design of the new, higher council is based on modern state bureaucratic structures. In many ways, it is a mirror image of state party organisations. The new organisation is organically connected with local and regional rituals and gatherings of the different Oromo groups. These are still taking place in accordance with older gadaa rules and ritual patterns. However, control over them is increasingly removed from traditional authorities. In some cases (such as the Tuulama abbaa gadaa), new leadership positions were also created amongst them. The political blending of old and new forms of leadership results in a ‘third’, new form of social organisation. Gadaa and state administration do not necessarily rely on completely different concepts of authority. Both constitute ‘representative’ systems of government, in that leaders and officeholders make decisions on behalf of others, whose interests they should represent (though gadaa also knows general assemblies for all members). Different, though, are their ways of recruitment and the political loyalties of leaders. Through introducing new electoral proceedings into gadaa, new staffing of key positions has become possible in the traditional system, that could be filled by government-­loyal candidates. The practical function of gadaa as a government parallel to the state also changed. From the state’s perspective, gadaa should primarily fulfil its role as a national icon, as a media-focused embodiment of the Oromo nation, which contributes to the ethnic-cultural identity policy of the federal state of Oromiyaa. Representative functions during public events and in the media therefore increasingly replace more immanent decision-­ making tasks of gadaa leaders.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

175

These developments are a result of conscious social engineering. Since the government wishes gadaa to confirm and strengthen its own political legitimation, it actively pursues a strategy of incorporating gadaa into its political network. In so doing, the state party aims to be faster, and more efficient, than its political rivals, who might aim at doing the same. Gadaa is a prime asset in the struggle between government and opposition for power and political legitimacy. All sides thereby share a similar interpretation of ‘gadaa democracy’, as a true form of ‘righteous government’. In striking contrast to the recent political realities of contest and upheaval in Ethiopia over the past few years, a rectified, ‘pure’ image of gadaa is created in their discourses, in which grey zones and political dissent seem to be almost disappearing. ‘Gadaa democracy’ is celebrated in different facets, but with a common baseline: as a valuable option and democratic alternative to other forms of government. Along these lines, Oromo actors of different political allegiances make use of the same new discursive power. They do not simply comply, and merely ‘exercise’, what is provided as a ‘Western’ political model of ‘democracy’, but prepare for actively countering the intellectual challenge, proposing a counter-model for democracy of a genuinely national or ethnic background, as an exemplary representation of “indigenous African democracy” (Legesse 2006, p. xiii, p. 9, p. 93; cf. Pausewang et al. 2002, p. 4). Similar discourses on ‘indigenous’ democracy have evolved elsewhere in Africa (Keane 2010, pp. 679–680; Owusu 2012, pp. 225–227) and in the wider global context (Stockwell 2012, p. 527). They signal new forms of empowerment, and a growing awareness of changing global and political orders. The addressees of the discourse on Oromo democracy are no longer primarily a ‘Western’ audience. Once predominantly contesting ‘Western’ prerogatives through raising postcolonial ‘voices’ (Spivak 1988) against their claims, postcolonial actors by now increasingly address other audiences. Publications, media, and internet fora are widely disseminated in Oromo language. They often do not seek acknowledgement by an English-speaking audience. In establishing increasingly independent discursive spaces, actors radically ‘provincialize’ (Chakrabarty 2007) European and North American legacies of defining ‘democracy’. Not only does this raise the ‘relativist question’ with regard to cultural diversity and pluralist polito-legal orders (‘Do Oromo actors have a right to organise society differently from European or US-American standards?’). Much more, the question of definitional power with regard to global political

176 

A. NICOLAS

concepts arises. Gadaa has become a ‘political philosophy’, a new theory that challenges ‘Western’ definitional hegemony.

References Abbink, Jon (2017). A Decade of Ethiopia: Politics, Economy and Society 2004–2016. Leiden: Brill. Addis Standard (2018). News: ODP Concludes Conference, Elects Nine Crucial Members of Its Executive Committee. See who is who. Addis Standard, 21 September 2018. Retrieved from http://addisstandard.com/ news-­o dp-­c oncludes-­c onference-­e lects-­n ine-­c rucial-­m embers-­e xecutive-­ committee-­see/ Africanews (2019). Oromo Youth Threat to Ethiopia’s Democracy— Journalist Eskinder Nega. 18 November 2019. Retrieved from https://www.africanews.com/2019/11/18/oromo-­y outh-­t hreat-­t o-­ ethiopia-­s-­democracy-­journalist-­eskinder-­nega/ A.G.C.  Statement (2016). Ibsa ejjennoo Gumii Tokkummaa Abbootii Gadaa Oromoo, waltajjii marii abbootii gadaa godinoota Oromiyaa mara walitti dhufan marii guyyaa sadiif (Hagayya 24–26/2008 A.L.H.) gaggeeffame, Bakka: Hoteela Rizortii Soodaree / Statement by the Union of Oromo Gadaa Councils on Current Affairs in Oromia, Issued Following the Conclusion of a Three Day Extraordinary Assembly Held from 30 August—1st September 2016 by Abba Gaddas representing all Oromia Provinces, Place: Sodere Resort Hotel. Posted by Oromian Economist, 2 September 2016. Retrieved from https://oromianeconomist.com/2016/09/02/ oromia-­ibsa-­ejjennoo-­gumii-­tokkummaa-­abbootii-­gadaa-­oromoo-­waltajjii-­ marii-­abbootii-­gadaa-­godinoota-­oromiyaa-­mara-­irraa-­walitti-­dhufan-­marii-­ guyyaa-­sadiif-­hagayya-­24-­262008-­a-­l-­h-­gaggeeffame/ Aguilar, Mario I. (1998). Reinventing Gada: Generational Knowledge in Boorana. In: Aguilar, Mario I. (Ed.), The Politics of Age and Gerontocracy in Africa: Ethnographies of the Past & Memories of the Present. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 257–279. Ahmed, Abiy (2017a). Countering Violent Extremism Through Social Capital: Anecdote from Jimma, Ethiopia. In: Horn of Africa Bulletin 29 (4), pp. 12–17. Ahmed, Abiy (2017b). Social Capital and its Role in Traditional Conflict Resolution in Ethiopia: The Case of Inter-Religious Conflict in Jimma Zone State. Unpublished PhD thesis, Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS), Addis Ababa University. Arnesen, Odd Eirik (1996). The Becoming of Place: A Tulama-Oromo Region in Northern Shewa. In: Baxter, Paul T. W. / Hultin, Jan / Triulzi, Alessandro (Eds.), Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, pp. 210–238.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

177

Atoma, Bekele (2019): “Oromo Liberation Army aka WBO Started Moving into a Temporary Camp Readied by Council of Oromia Abbaa Gadaas in Mana Sibu, West Wollegga”, by Bekele Atoma Boru (Journalist, BBC Horn of Africa), posted on Twitter on 19 February 2019. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ bek_boru/status/1097883770357719041 Bach, Jean-Nicolas (2013). Abyotawi Democracy: Neither Revolutionary nor Democratic, a Critical Review of EPRDF’s Conception of Revolutionary Democracy in Post-1991 Ethiopia. In: Abbink, Jon / Hagmann, Tobias (Eds.), Reconfiguring Ethiopia: The Politics of Authoritarian Reform. London: Routledge, pp. 62–84. Barnett, Clive (2017). The Priority of Injustice: Locating Democracy in Critical Theory. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Bassi, Marco (2005). Decisions in the Shade: Political and Juridical Processes among the Oromo-Borana. (First published in 1996) Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press. Bassi, Marco (1996). Power’s Ambiguity or the Political Significance of Gada. In: Baxter, Paul T. W. / Hultin, Jan / Triulzi, Alessandro (Eds.), Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, pp. 150–161. Baxter, Paul T. W. (1978). Boran Age-Sets and Generation-Sets: Gada, a Puzzle or a Maze? In: Baxter, Paul T. W. / Almagor, Uri (Eds.), Age, Generation and Time: Some Features of East African Age Organisations. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 151–182. BBC Africa (2019). Abiy Ahmed: Ethiopia’s Prime Minister. BBC World News, Africa, 11 October 2019. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-­africa-­43567007 BBC Africa (2016). Ethiopia Cancels Addis Ababa Master Plan After Oromo Protests. BBC World News, Africa. 13 January 2016. Retrieved from https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-­africa-­35300471 BBC Oromo (2019a). Simannaa WBO: ‘Ajaja hayyu duree ABO fi waamicha Abbootii Gadaa kabajnee galle’ [Welcoming of the Oromo Liberation Army: ‘We respected the order of the OLF leader and the call of the Abbaa Gadaa’s’]. BBC News Afaan Oromoo, 20 February 2019. Retrieved from https://www. bbc.com/afaanoromoo/oduu-­47309345 BBC Oromo (2019b). ‘Mootummaan seeran ala Gumii Tokkummaa Abbootii Gadaa diige’—Bayyanaa Sambatuu [‘The government and foreign law demolished the National Abbaa Gadaa’s Council’—Bayyanaa Sanbatuu]. BBC News Afaan Oromoo, 24 April 2019. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/afaanoromoo/oduu-­48037893 BBC Oromo (2018). Sirna baalli dabarsuu abbootii gadaa [Handover-ceremony of the Abbaa Gadaa’s], filmed by Habtamu Tibebu and edited by Yadeta

178 

A. NICOLAS

Berhanu. BBC News Afaan Oromoo, 1 October 2018. Retrieved from https:// www.bbc.com/afaanoromoo/oduu-­45703613 Birch, Anthony (1993). The Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy. London: Routledge. Bitima, Tamene (2000). A Dictionary of Oromo Technical Terms: Oromo— English. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Blackhurst, Hector (1978). Continuity and Change in the Shoa Galla Gada System. In: Baxter, Paul T. W. / Almagor, Uri (Eds.), Age, Generation and Time: Some Features of East African Age Organisations. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 245–267. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). The Forms of Capital. In: John G.  Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. (First published in 1983) New York, NY: Greenwood Press, pp. 241–258. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2007). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (First published in 2000) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clapham, Christopher (2017). The Horn of Africa: State Formation and Decay. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Clapham, Christopher (1988). Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daba Tola, Mulualem (2019). ‘Qeerroo Fi Qarree’: The Engine of Current Transition in Ethiopia Politics. In: International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 9 (5), pp. 534–543. Dahl, Robert (1989). Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dea [Barata], Data (2012). Family Connections: Inherited Status and Parliamentary Elections in Dawro, Southern Ethiopia. In: Tronvoll, Kjetil / Hagmann, Tobias (Eds.), Contested Power in Ethiopia: Traditional Authorities and Multi-­ Party Elections. Leiden: Brill, pp. 89–109. Debebe, Solomon (2017). The Political and Religious Significance of “Odaa Tree” and “Odaa Nabe” among Tulama Oromo in Akakki Wereda, Oromia Special Zone Surrounding Finfine. Unpublished MA thesis in Social Anthropology, Addis Ababa University. Accessible under: http://etd.aau.edu. et/bitstream/handle/123456789/3254/Solomon%20Debebe.pdf Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. (First published in 1993) New  York, NY: Routledge. Donham, Donald L. (2012). The 2005 Elections in Maale: A Reassertion of Traditional Authority or the Extension of a Nascent Public Sphere? In: Tronvoll, Kjetil / Hagmann, Tobias (Eds.), Contested Power in Ethiopia: Traditional Authorities and Multi-Party Elections. Leiden: Brill, pp. 251–268.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

179

Ege, Svein (1996). Class, State, and Power in Africa: A Case Study of the Kingdom of Shäwa (Ethiopia) about 1840. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Finfinne Tribune (2014a). In Photos: Founding Congress of the Oromo Abbaa Gadaa’s Council (Gumii Abbooti Gadaa). Finfinne Tribune (Gadaa.com), 9 October 2014. Retrieved from http://gadaa.net/FinfinneTribune/2014/10/ in-­p hotos-­f ounding-­c ongress-­o f-­t he-­o romo-­a bbaa-­g adaas-­c ouncil-­g umii-­ abbooti-­gadaa/ Finfinne Tribune (2014b). Updated: OSA Workshop on Gadaa Renaissance: With Abbaa Gadaa Bayyanaa Sanbatoo of Caffee Tulama. Finfinne Tribune (Gadaa.com), 13 September 2014. Retrieved from http://gadaa.net/ FinfinneTribune/2014/09/complete-­list-­of-­the-­u-­s-­a-­lecture-­tour-­abbaa-­ gadaa-­b ayana-­s anbatu-­o f-­c affee-­t ulama-­a t-­t he-­o sa-­w orkshop-­o n-­g adaa-­ research-­and-­renaissance/ Fisher, Jonathan / Tsehaye Gebrewahd, Meressa (2019). ‘Game Over’? Abiy Ahmed, The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and Ethiopia’s Political Crisis. In: African Affairs 118 (470), pp. 194–206. Fratkin, Elliot (2014). Ethiopia’s Pastoralist Policies: Development, Displacement and Resettlement. In: Nomadic Peoples 18 (1), pp. 94–114. Garretson, Peter P. (2000). A History of Addis Abäba from its Foundation in 1886 to 1910. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Green, Philip (2014). American Democracy: Selected Essays on Theory, Practice, and Critique. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Haberland, Eike (1963). Galla Süd-Äthiopiens. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag. Hagmann, Tobias / Abbink, Jon (2013). The Politics of Authoritarian Reform in Ethiopia, 1991 to 2012. In: Abbink, Jon / Hagmann, Tobias (Eds.), Reconfiguring Ethiopia: The Politics of Authoritarian Reform. London: Routledge, pp. 1–16. Hagmann, Tobias (2012). Fishing for Votes in the Somali Region: Clan Elders, Bureaucrats and Party Politics. In: Tronvoll, Kjetil / Hagmann, Tobias (Eds.), Contested Power in Ethiopia. Traditional Authorities and Multi-Party Elections. Leiden: Brill, pp. 61–88. Hailu, Mengistu / Kassa, Getahun / Balehegn, Mulubrhan (2008). Traditional Governance Systems and their Operational Linkage with Formal Governing Structures in Aba’ala Woreda, North Afar. In: Brems, Eva / Van der Beken, Christophe (Eds.), Federalism and the Protection of Human Rights in Ethiopia. Berlin: Lit Verlag, pp. 211–232. Hassen, Mohammed (2015). The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia 1300–1700. Woodbridge: James Currey. Hassen, Mohammed (1990). The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History 1570–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayilee, Alamaayyoo (2007). Sirna Gadaa. Siyaasa Oromoo Tuulamaa. Finfinnee [Addis Ababa]: Biiroo Aadaa fi Tuurizimii Oromiyaa.

180 

A. NICOLAS

Hero Channel (2018). Oromo Abbaa Gadaa Leader Arrived in Bergen Airport 06.20.2018 [sic, 20.06.2018]. Film of HK-Studio, by Hiruy Kahsy. Posted on YouTube by Hero Channel, 21 June 2018. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y0cfRgr2Q0 Keane, John (2010). The Life and Death of Democracy. (First published in 2009) London: Pocket Books. Knutsson, Karl Eric (1967). Authority and Change: A Study of the Kallu Institution among the Macha Galla of Ethiopia. Göteborg: Etnografiska Museet. Lagatafo Studio (2016). Irreecha 2016 Full video Oromia. Posted on YouTube by Lagatafo Studio, 3 October 2016. Retrieved from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=_KlcqkTTsY0 Legesse, Asmarom (2006). Oromo Democracy: An Indigenous African Political System. (First published in 2000) Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press. Legesse, Asmarom (1973). Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society. New York, NY: The Free Press. Lepisa [Aba Jobir], Dinsa (1975). The Gada System of Government and Sera Caffe Oromo: A Critical Examination of the Legal Institutions of the Oromo People. Unpublished LL.B./BA thesis, Faculty of Law. Addis Ababa: National University. Leus, Ton (2006). Aadaa Boraanaa: A Dictionary of Borana Culture. (First published in 1995) Addis Ababa: Shama Books. Levine, Donald N. (2000). Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society. (First published in 1974) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, Herbert S. (1996). The Development of Oromo Political Consciousness from 1958 to 1994. In: Baxter, Paul T. W. / Hultin, Jan / Triulzi, Alessandro (Eds.), Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, pp. 37–47. Mains, Daniel (2012). Cynicism and Hope: Urban Youth and Relations of Power During the 2005 Ethiopian Elections. In: Tronvoll, Kjetil / Hagmann, Tobias (Eds.), Contested Power in Ethiopia: Traditional Authorities and Multi-Party Elections. Leiden: Brill, pp. 137–163. Mbuyinga, Elenga (1989). Tribalisme et Problème National en Afrique Noire: Le Cas du Kamerun. Contribution à l’étude de la question des nationalités et du problème régional. Paris: L’Harmattan. Midega, Milkessa (2017). The Revitalization of Gadaa Federation in Oromia. In: Lemessa, Fikre et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Oromoo Studies organized by the Institute of Oromoo Studies (IOS), Jimma University, 1–2 June 2017 Jimma, Oromia, Ethiopia, pp. 156–186. Ministry of Culture and Tourism (2015). The Federal Republic of Ethiopia Sustainable Tourism Master Plan 2015–2025. Addis Ababa: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

181

Mo’aa TV (2018): Documentary: Inside the Oromo Cultural Center in Finfinne (Ormaaniyaa S1 Ep2: Har’ammoo giddu gala aadaa Oromoo waliin daawwanna). Mo’aa TV, Documentary, 2018, 1h 12m. Posted by Finfinne Tribune, 9 September 2019. Retrieved from https://finfinnetribune.com/videos/documentary/documentary-­inside-­the-­oromo-­cultural-­center-­in-­finfinne/ Nicolas, Andrea (2013). Like Fathers, Like Sons: Age-Staging and Generational Stumbling Blocks, The Boran Gadaa Experience. In: Nicolas, Andrea / Flaherty, Ian (Eds.), Growing Up, Growing Old: Trajectories of Times and Lives. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp. 87–110. Nicolas, Andrea (2006). Governance, Ritual and Law: Tulama Oromo Gadaa Assemblies. In: Uhlig, Siegbert (Ed.), Proceedings of the XVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Hamburg July 20–25, 2003. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. O’Donnell, Guillermo (2010). Democracy, Agency, and the State: Theory with Comparative Intent. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Østebø, Terje (2012). Islam and Politics: The EPRDF, the 2005 Elections and Muslim Institutions in Bale. In: Tronvoll, Kjetil / Hagmann, Tobias (Eds.), Contested Power in Ethiopia: Traditional Authorities and Multi-Party Elections. Leiden: Brill, pp. 165–192. Owusu, Maxwell (2012). Africa. In: Isakhan, Benjamin / Stockwell, Stephen (Eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 223–232. Paley, Julia (2002). Toward an Anthropology of Democracy. In: Annual Review of Anthropology 31, pp. 469–496. Pausewang, Siegfried / Tronvoll, Kjetil / Aalen, Lovise (2002). Democratisation in Ethiopia: Some Notes on Theory and Methodology. In: Pausewang, Siegfried / Tronvoll, Kjetil / Aalen, Lovise (Eds.), Ethiopia Since the Derg: A Decade of Democratic Pretension and Performance. London: Zed Books, pp. 1–25. PRI (2018). Exiled Rebel Leader Returns Home to Ethiopia to ‘Play a Role in the Reconstruction of the Country’. Public Radio International (PRI) / Reuters, edited by Duncan Miriri and Ros Russell. 15 September 2018. Retrieved from https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-­09-­15/exiled-­rebel-­leader-­returns-­ home-­ethiopia-­play-­role-­reconstruction-­country QBO (2019). Qeerroo: The National Youth Movement for Freedom and Democracy. Website of Qeerroo Bilisummaa Oromoo. Retrieved from https:// qeerroo.org/ Reinvent Ethiopia (2015). Oromo Cultural Centre—Finfinnee. Posted on YouTube by Reinvent Ethiopia, 27 March 2015. Retrieved from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=zlK2DNnzmUo RL (2016). Nomination file no. 01164 for inscription in 2016 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: RL 2016—No. 01164. Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural

182 

A. NICOLAS

Heritage, Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Eleventh session, Addis-Ababa, Ethiopia, 28 November to 2 December 2016. [Nomination file of the Ethiopian government for the Oromo gadaa system, submitted to the UNESCO]. Accessible under: https://ich. unesco.org/en/RL/gada-­system-­an-­indigenous-­democratic-­socio-­political-­ system-­of-­the-­oromo-­01164 RMN (2019). Labsii nagayaa Gumii Abbootii Gadaa Oromiyaa. Robe Media Network, 24 January 2019. Retrieved from https://www.robemedia. com/2019/01/24/labsii-­nagayaa-­gumii-­abbootii-­gadaa-­oromiyaa/ Runciman, David (2018). Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, From Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond. (First published in 2008) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schlee, Günther (1992). Ritual Topography and Ecological Use: The Gabbra of the Kenyan/Ethiopian Borderlands. In: Croll, Elisabeth / Parkin, David (Eds.), Bush Base: Forest Farm. Culture, Environment and Development. London: Routledge, pp. 110–128. Shapiro, Ian / Hacker-Cordón, Casiano (1999). Promises and Disappointments: Reconsidering Democracy’s Value. In: Shapiro, Ian / Hacker-Cordón, Casiano (Eds.), Democracy’s Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–19. Shongolo, Abdullahi A. (1996). The Poetics of Nationalism: A Poem by Jaarso Waaqo Qoot’o. In: Baxter, Paul T. W. / Hultin, Jan / Triulzi, Alessandro (Eds.), Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, pp. 265–290. Soorii, Caalaa (2016). Irreecha fi Gadaa. Duukam: No publisher. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In: Nelson, Cary / Grossberg, Lawrence (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313. Stockwell, Stephen (2012). The Future History of Democracy. In: Isakhan, Benjamin / Stockwell, Stephen (Eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 525–542. Svensson, Palle (1995). Theories of Democracy: The Brno Lectures. (First published in 1993) Aarhus: University of Aarhus, Department of Political Science. Tadesse Birbirso, Dereje (2019). Qeerroo Movement, Gadaa Didactics and Critical Pedagogy: Implications and Applications for Collective Critical Action for Change. Paper presented on The Oromo Studies Association 33rd Annual Conference, July 26–28, 2019, Rift Valley University. Tafla, Bairu (1987). Asma Giyorgis and His Work: History of the Galla and the Kingdom of Sawa. (First published in 1908) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Teegarden, David A. (2014). Death to Tyrants! Ancient Greek Democracy and the Struggle against Tyranny. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The East African (2018). Ethiopia’s Oromo Peoples Democratic Organisation Rebrands. The East African, 23.9.2018. Retrieved from

  IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY 

183

https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/africa/Ethiopian-­p ar ty-­ rebrands/4552902-­4773934-­12qo4bw/index.html The Guardian (2018). ‘Freedom!’: The Mysterious Movement that Brought Ethiopia to a Standstill. The Guardian, International Edition, by Tom Gardner, 13 March 2018. Retrieved from https://theguardian.com/global-­development/2018/ mar/13/freedom-­oromo-­activists-­qeerroo-­ethiopia-­standstill The Guardian (2016). Ethiopia: Many Dead in Anti-Government Protest at Religious Festival. The Guardian, International Edition, by Jason Burke (Africa correspondent), 3 October 2016. Retrieved from https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/02/ethiopia-­m any-­d ead­anti-­government-­protest-­religious-­festival TVO News (2014). Gumii Abbooti Gadaa Oromiyaa. TVO ‘Oduu’ [Oromiyaa Regional Television News]. Posted on YouTube by Reinvent Ethiopia, 4 July 2014. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi8Yb6m353w UNESCO (2016a). Gada System, an Indigenous Democratic Socio-Political System of the Oromo, Ethiopia, Inscribed in 2016 [...] on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO official website. Retrieved from https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/gada-­system-­an-­ indigenous-­democratice-­socio-­political-­system-­of-­the-­oromo-­01164 UNESCO (2016b). Requesting International Assistance. UNESCO official website. Retrieved from https://ich.unesco.org/en/requesting-­assistance-­00039 UNESCO (2003). The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Paris, 17 October 2003. 32nd Session of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, 29 September–17 October 2003. Accessible under: https://ich.unesco.org/doc/ src/01852-­EN.pdf Vaughan, Sarah (2015). Federalism, Revolutionary Democracy and the Developmental State, 1991–2012. In: Prunier, Gérard / Ficquet, Éloi (Eds.). Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia. London: Hurst & Company, pp. 283–311. Verdery, Katherine (1996). What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vernon, Richard (2001). Political Morality: A Theory of Liberal Democracy. London: Continuum. VOA (2019). Abbaan Gadaa Tuulamaa Duraanii Bayyanaa Sanbatuu Biiroo Aadaa fi Tuurizimii Oromiyaa Irratti Komii Dhiheessan [Former abbaa gadaa of the Tuulama, Bayyanaa Sanbatuu, brings complaints about Oromiyaa Culture and Tourism Bureau]. VOA Afaan Oromoo  – Oduu (Voice of America, News), authored by Naakoor Malkaa, 26. April 2019. Retrieved from https://www. voaafaanoromoo.com/a/4893405.html Wallach, John R. (2018). Democracy and Goodness: A Historicist Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

184 

A. NICOLAS

Watson, Elizabeth E. (2009). Debates over Culture in Konso since Decentralization (1991). In: Schlee, Günther / Watson, Elizabeth E. (Eds.), Changing Identifications and Alliances in North-East Africa. Volume I: Ethiopia and Kenya. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, pp. 173–190. Wolin, Sheldon S. (2008). Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zitelmann, Thomas (1994). Nation der Oromo: Kollektive Identitäten, nationale Konflikte, Wir-Gruppenbildungen. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch.

Contested Authorities, International Experts, and the Quest for Social Justice: Negotiating Social Welfare in an African Setting Sabine Klocke-Daffa

1   Introduction: The Amazing Otjivero The small settlement of Otjivero with its mostly Damara population, situated about 120 km east of Namibia’s capital Windhoek, is a remarkable place. Not only should it never have come into existence in the first place, nor was it expected to survive. Even 20  years after its foundation and despite its international reputation as a place of pioneering spirit, one would not find it on any of the country’s maps, nor is it indicated at the road junction where the asphalt road turns into the gravel path which leads past the village. What is signposted is the nearby, and equally small, settlement of Omitara and the nearby Nautedam water reservoir. One may even find a railway stop indicating Otjivero, but no train has stopped there in decades. Tourists who are unaware of the history of the place or that of

S. Klocke-Daffa (*) Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_7

185

186 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

the wider Omaheke region usually pass by heading for their safari trips inside Botswana. What made Otjivero a special place was a much-noticed social experiment—the unconditional Basic Income Grant (BIG) project—running for several years between 2007 and 2014, and the fact that it gave rise to a remarkable clash of authorities and contested modes of power which heavily influenced a process of political negotiations to this day. That was my starting point: to take a closer look at how authority is legitimized in post-­ apartheid countries such as Namibia from a sociocultural anthropology point of view.

2   Authority, Power, and Legitimacy Looking at African societies and their different social welfare regimes,1 it is remarkable how many experts2 claim to have a say on political decisions. This is particularly true in any kind of project development requiring financial resources. Since many if not all African states are dependent on external aid to realize extraordinary initiatives and pilot projects, expert opinion, allegedly unerring and true, is highly sought after. The cultural authority [of science] is, therefore, an aspiration as much as it is a social fact in any society, to be an institution of general repute able to speak truth to power. (Bauer et al. 2019, p. 7)

Today’s easily available scientific knowledge, produced and presented by peripatetic experts, has long been integrated into processes of political negotiations. Science has become a culturally valuated resource instrumentalized to provide information or legitimize political decision-making, enforce aspirations to power or impede the proposals of the opposition no matter how justified claims may be. This is equally true in political debates on social justice, especially when consent is difficult to achieve. The Namibian basic income scheme is a fine example of negotiated authority in local and national settings revealing that ‘social justice’ is a contested 1  For a definition of ‘regimes of social welfare’ in sub-Saharan Africa, see Künzler and Nollert (2017, pp. 3–8). 2  Experts are conceived here as members of power networks. ‘Expertise’ can then be defined as skills and knowledge of a person or of a system considered to be a legitimate authority parallel to other sources of authority.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

187

concept and ‘authority’ might be claimed by many stakeholders in the process. However, before focusing on the Namibian situation, it is advisable to look into some of the theoretical foundations of authority, legitimacy, and power. What do I mean by these terms which stake out the core concepts of this book? Starting with a tentative first outline, I define authority as the reputation attributed to a position or institution held by an individual who serves as a role model demonstrating how to do ‘the right thing’ that others may follow in regard to their acting and thinking. Legitimacy is the justification of norms shared by a collective—which is not by definition the same as legality based on a body of recognized laws. The legitimacy of norms and the legality of laws do not always coincide, as Steven Bernstein and William Coleman (2009, p. 5) noted. Power would then be the ability to influence other persons, be that by the authority of one’s own position or with reference to shared norms deemed legitimate. But there are intermediate stages and overlaps: moral legitimacy refers to compliance with the social values of a social group instead of embracing power; traditional authority, according to Janine Ubink, is “leadership whose leadership is rooted in history—either real or invented—and culture, often combined with religious, divine or sacred references” (Ubink 2008, p. 9); and alternative authorities is used to denote the coexistence and parallelism of power relations. As has been demonstrated (see the introduction to this volume), the terms are far from being easily defined which makes it difficult to use them as categories of analysis. Thus, power may not just be the ability of an individual or group to control the behaviour of others, as Max Weber denoted (1922, p.  28), or be based on the manipulation of networks (Foucault 1991, p. 94). We may find power-holders who, in practice, do not have much to say, as there are some who appear powerless at first sight but are said to have access to special kinds of sources of power such as cosmic beings or occult forces, or else use strategies of circumvention in support of those in power for the sake of own political goals. Equally so, legitimacy may or may not be perceived of as to be attached to power-holding, and authority may not go along with legitimacy or appear as some kind of ‘negative’ or inverted authority based mainly on “moral rhetoric” (see Krämer in this volume, following Graeber 2007). This does not imply the absence of either one. The question then is: how is power conceptualized, who are the ‘legitimate leaders’, and what is authority based on if all

188 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

convenient definitions are found blended or altogether separated from one another? Within the African context, it appears promising to look bottom up at the specific ways of authority-granting, the different forms of legitimacy, and the persons exercising ‘power’. It is in this line that traditional authorities (again) gained attention since it became more and more evident that these institutions are far from being outmoded or irrelevant to African politics (for the renewed interest in traditional authorities, see Cook and Hardin 2013; Folkwang and Dingbobga 2009; Kessel and Oomen 1997; Krämer 2020; Oomen 2008; Ubink 2008; Williams 2010; and the edited volume by d’Engelbronner-Kolff et al. 1998). In addition to the enhanced attention to notions of authority, there was a renaissance of the classic topics of ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’ when cultural connotations of political institutions were brought back onstage (Comaroff and Comaroff 2018; Myers 2008). Following Barbara Oomen, the “quest for cultural revival reflected [. . .] a global mood of recognizing culture within law and politics, and of ‘rights to roots’ ” (2008, p. 82). A closer look at the literature on Southern Africa, including South Africa, Namibia, and Angola, reveals that there is a strong focus on relational aspects of power and legitimacy in regard to title holders, political parties or movements, and the state.3 Recent research focusing on resistance to neo-traditional leadership within a democratic system challenges the prevailing dichotomy of traditional authority being either despotic or democratic or being obstructive to democracy (Krämer 2020; Zenker and Höhne 2018). What appears somewhat neglected is the fact that authority may well be contested from within the political system without being openly confronted or even challenged. Rather than analysing top-down institutional hierarchies or postcolonial connotations of oppression and submission (for an overview, see Friedman 2018, pp. 166–169), I suggest to focus on emic views on who is granted authority, what types of legitimacy can be detected, and how individuals cope with power. This may include hidden strategies of recruiting allies as well as forms of subordination conceived of as respect and anticipated loyalty. To obtain a clearer 3  See Bennett (1998) on the constitutional base of traditional authorities and their relationship to the state; Hinz (1998) on traditional versus democracy-based legitimacy; Kössler (1998) on ‘vindicatory politics’ of the Witbooi traditional authority; Lang (2004) on strategies of adjustment and negotiation; Oloruntoba (2018) on the institutionalization of political parties; Schubert (2010) on political authority in a presidency-oriented power-structure; Krämer (2019) with a procedural perspective on competing political movements.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

189

picture of the relational as well as procedural aspects of political decisions, it therefore appears promising to look at the various actors, the sources of authority and the forms of legitimacy connected to the cause. This paper seeks to inquire into the role of (contested) authority and legitimacy in national schemes of social welfare. It draws mainly on J.  Michael William’s prolific theoretical approach dealing with multiple legitimacies in post-apartheid South Africa. Williams distinguishes between two forms of legitimacy: a moral legitimacy and a performative legitimacy. Moral legitimacy includes the norms, values, and symbols of a society defining what ‘appropriate’ political acting is. Performative legitimacy is revealed in the way that power is executed and whether power holders and citizens agree that the political system is serving the common good. Both should go hand in hand, but that does not necessarily happen (Williams 2010, pp. 21–24, pp. 28–30). The key question that guided my investigation addresses the relationship between actors and political output: what impact do different forms of legitimacy have on political negotiations over social schemes in local as well as national settings where the authority of leading actors is contested? I argue that to gain a full understanding of social-political initiatives, why they have been successful, why they failed or remain pending, it appears helpful to not only include the actors, contexts, and causes, but to also look into the deeper dimensions of decision-making. They may heavily influence the processes of authority-granting and legitimacy-claiming, even more so where concepts are found fluid, impalpable, and possibly also culture-specific. The controversial case of social welfare presented in this chapter shows how the project was liable to fail but, in the end, may leave open a door to renegotiation precisely because of its entangled authorities.

3   Research Methods This chapter is based on field research conducted in 2018 and 2019. The majority of empirical data on political issues was collected by in-depth interviews, one with a main political figure in the process which shed new light on central issues of power and authority, and another six with politicians, members of trade unions, and representatives of institutions of civil society. The results were supplemented by the analysis of 25 press releases on relevant topics of legitimacy and power published by 4  of the most influential Namibian newspapers. In addition, during my revisits to

190 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

Otjivero village in 2019, I had the chance for informal conversations with four members of the former BIG organizing village committee, providing valuable complementary information to assess the emic view of the villagers on the impact of the project. Previous stays at Otjivero (between 2011 and 2017) contributed immensely to assessing the implementation and perception of the project and the view of members of the Basic Income Coalition acting as the supervisory committee. Preceding empirical fieldwork included a much larger number of in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions with the local population as well as more than 350 qualitative and quantitative interviews on the original basic income project. The results of empirical fieldwork have been published elsewhere (Klocke-Daffa 2017, 2012). They will be consulted to provide some helpful information on the project but are not subject to this chapter.

4   Political Outline: Basic Income Grants in Namibia In 1990, Namibia was one of the last countries of the African continent to become independent. After a 20-year war of independence, 70  years of political domination by South Africa, preceded by 30  years of German colonial rule, the time had come for Namibians to take their fate into their own hands. It was the end of apartheid, the end of racial segregation, of political custodianship and economic restrictions. In the 1990s, the spirit of independence was to be felt everywhere—anything seemed possible, open, and free. It may still be this spirit of openness that encourages politicians and traditional authorities to listen to the needs of people and keep hierarchical structures within tolerable limits. Namibians would not hesitate to directly approach their political representatives by visits in parliament, calling them on their mobile phones at home or—most favoured—openly addressing them with any kind of grievance and complaint via the newspapers by sending SMS messages which are reprinted even when sent anonymously.4 However, social and political hierarchies do play a role, in particular in processes of negotiations over power and authority.

4  For the political significance of the press in postcolonial Namibia, s. Miescher (1999); Rothe (2010).

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

191

Thirty years after independence, it has become clear that the spirit of independence did not lead to substantial changes and hopes for social improvements are fading. Neither could pre-independence economic disparities be reduced, nor did social stratifications become less distinctive. The former liberation front SWAPO, which later became the dominant party in parliament and whose members are mainly of northern Namibian Ovambo, had begun to place their followers wherever possible—behind closed doors, many call this process the ‘Ovambosation of the county’. Allegations of corruption figure prominently among the most frequently documented political scandals in the papers, and nepotism has become the normal path to a professional career. The former white minority in power was replaced by the members of the black elite who are accumulating huge wealth (mostly through governmental and parastatal institutions) rather than dissolving social and economic disparities. Though being a relatively rich country with a population of little more than 2 million inhabitants, Namibia has for years faced the sad fame of being the country with the world’s highest discrepancy of income distribution—only to be topped by South Africa since 2015 (Index Mundi 2019). Among the few with access to alternative sources of political influence are those authorities legitimized by either traditional offices or by church positions. Since some of them enjoy close connections to the ruling party or have been entangled in long-lasting internal quarrels over access to office as traditional authorities (like among the Herero and Nama), it is mostly church representatives who work at the bottom of society and speak out in public when pointing to unjust economic conditions and appalling living conditions in urban and rural areas. The most influential institution is the Protestant Lutheran Church, with regional branches all over the country (Buys and Nambala 2003). It was this church that organized the basic income project. Namibia thus became the first country willing to grant an unconditional income to all inhabitants of one village serving as a pilot project. It was intensively documented from the outset and evaluated (Haarmann 2015; Haarmann and Haarmann 2012, 2005; Haarmann et al. 2019a, b, 2009, 2008; Jauch 2015). Even though running for only two years and another five  years with reduced monthly allowances, it initiated global discussions on a large-scale giving way to similar projects—but turned out to be the most controversial of all. It started in 2007 and was granted in addition to other existing social benefits. Among them are those for the disabled, for vulnerable children,

192 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

maternity leave and—most importantly—state pensions for all Namibians above 60 years of age. The basic income grant was held most necessary due to the fact that Namibia is lacking social benefits for the unemployed. Since many Namibians are not receiving regular salaries or lose jobs after short periods of employment, many households are suffering from a lack of financial resources. Taking into account various statistical data with different methods of measuring, the unemployment rate in the years before the start of the Basic Income Project figured between 37% and 51%, with youth unemployment up to 75% (Jauch 2015, p. 338).5 Apart from the grand causes of equality, dignity, and justice to all citizens, the project was intended above all to alleviate poverty on the local level. As in many rural settlements of the Omaheke region, the overall social and economic situation was one of destitution, with Otjivero being one of the worst places to live: in 2007, 76% of the population was found to be living below the minimum standard, two-thirds of all households did not have sufficient food, and more than 40% of all children were found to be malnourished. The great majority of them lived in small tin houses (Figs. 1 and 2) with their large families (Haarmann et al. 2009, p. 15). Due to financial constraints of the organizers, it was agreed that the grant should be conceptualized as a subsistence allowance which, at the time, was only a third of what was needed to cover even the minimum of basic needs per month of an estimated 262 N$ per month (equal to about 40 US$ or 30 EUR; see Jauch 2015, p. 339).6 The grant was provided and distributed by the Desk for Social Development of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia, represented by the then Bishop Zephania Kameeta, who acted on the national as well as on the international scene promoting the project and advocating sponsoring. This eventually allowed the money to be granted to about 900 registered inhabitants of Otjivero for an initial period of two years. With the support of sponsoring institutions (mostly German church congregations), it was possible to extend the project with some interruptions for another five years with a 20% reduced bridging allowance. Everyone registered was entitled to receive 100 N$ per month (equivalent to 10 EUR or 15 US$) at the time of initiation. In an average household with two or more adults and six to eight children, the monthly allowance would total at least 1000  N$. Added up for a 5  Based on the Namibia Labour Force Surveys 1997–2013. International statistics show similar differences in their data (s. also Klocke-Daffa 2017, p. 5). 6  Jauch is referring to the Central Bureau of Statistics 2008 without further indication.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

193

Fig. 1  View of Otjivero. (Photo by the author)

family of ten, it was more than the salary of a farm worker who at that time would be paid 600 to 700 N$ (i.e. 80 to 90 US$) even if he were the only one on regular income. The additional allowance did not cover the true cost of living, nor was it ever meant to, but to many it did make a difference to pre-BIG conditions. Two years later, in 2009, the project was re-evaluated (Haarmann et al. 2009, p. 46, p. 68). It turned out that the social situation had changed for the better, the housing conditions had improved, people were better nourished, their children better educated and in much better health. However, the income per head of household had dropped due to in-­ moving family members from outside of Otjivero, and only very few people started businesses on their own or invested in other economic endeavours. As my own complementary research findings indicated, these results were partly due to cultural facts demonstrating a strong impact on the way income grants were deployed (Klocke-Daffa 2017, pp.  14–19). Income

194 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

Fig. 2  Otjivero women in front of their house. (Photo by the author)

grants were not always invested as anticipated by politicians and outside experts, but very much in line with the cultural norms and values of Damara society which values an elaborate system of social exchange. Where the reputation of a person rests in large part on the willingness to share with others, it becomes mandatory to share incoming resources, even more so under economic constraint. Social networks symbolize an important part of the cultural identity of the Otjivero community and provide a valuable social and economic resource which can be referred to in times of need. So many Otjivero inhabitants decided to use the money in a way that they deemed appropriate. Evaluation results showed that more than 50% of all expenditure transfers were given as gifts (Klocke-­ Daffa 2017, p. 15). Rather than spending the monthly allowance of BIG money on economic start-ups, the recipients preferred to spend it on highly valued social relations, thus transferring economic into social capital.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

195

By the time the project was about to expire, the village of Otjivero had become internationally known. Experts from all parts of the world appeared on the scene: politicians and journalists, members of church congregations and World Bank economists, sociologists and anthropologists, student bloggers and members of online platforms like the ‘Basic Income Grant Earth Network’ or the ‘Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa’ (OSISA) promoting the welfare of a vibrant South Africa. However, despite all international and national support in favour of the project, at its peak a number of political and church authorities fiercely quarrelled in parliament as well as in public about the usefulness of this project. Similarly, peripatetic experts from around the world put forward contested ideas on the best way to promote social welfare, and the public interest spurred the general debate, not least via the Namibian media, with regular reports and comments on the pros and cons.

5   Contested Authorities: Whose Claims Prevail? The Namibian Basic Income Project was after all quite successful and could have been further expanded, had it all been about fighting poverty and the quest for social justice. In the end, the initiative was dropped not for a lack of financial means or unsubstantiated necessity but for the open question of power and authority in post-apartheid Namibia. Looking at the different stake-holders with competing concepts,7 it is apparent that besides the question of power, different notions of authority and legitimacy can be detected—one in favour of the presidential authority determining what needs to be done for the common good; the other the authority of church leaders defining the adequate political action necessary in a country facing poverty and socio-economic injustice. A third component seems worthwhile considering within the political context: the importance of personal allegiance, loyalty, and respect. 5.1  Moral and Performative Legitimacy When, in 2010, the then president of State Hifikepunye Pohamba openly declared that, in his view, BIG would make people lazy, and that it was against the common good to spend basic income money, he demonstrated his performative legitimacy with striking success: most of his followers 7

 For the different fields of contested claims, s. Klocke-Daffa (2017, p. 19).

196 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

within and outside government as well as influential members of the National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW), affiliated to the ruling party, abstained from further support of the BIG.8 Clarifying his decision, the president referred to the expertise of international economic experts and opposing views from those Namibians who were strongly against the idea of redistributing national resources. It never became evident whether he did take international expertise into serious consideration. After all, despite the fact that some influential economists also opposed the matter, there were others strongly in favour of the BIG.9 Pohamba’s refusal to continue the project might well have been due to his personal aversion to the idea of giving something to people without a return—a concept he deeply distrusted. The opposition from international experts would have thus encouraged him to openly argue against the BIG. However, another aspect should be taken into consideration. What was not made public but appeared obvious was the clash of authority: the political power of the head of state versus the moral authority of a protestant bishop who at that time was touring Namibia and foreign countries, presenting a project to serve humanity. This was an open challenge to what was considered to be the legitimate authority of decision-making of the head of state. Referring to Michael William’s model of legitimacy, the moral legitimacy at this moment clearly resided on the side of the church, even more so after the presidential stand against the BIG—whereas the performative legitimacy and political power was on the side of the government, even though with ambivalent positions about what would serve the common good. In the end, it led to a clash of authorities which sealed the death of the Namibian Basic Income scheme. The project ended in 2014 because the church ran out of money, Bishop Kameeta retired, and the government would no longer talk about BIG. For many, that was also the end of Otjivero. With no other means than pensions and little money obtained from remittances by outside donors, the place seemed to be condemned to ruin and would disappear in much the same way as it had appeared on the scene years before. When I visited the village in 2017 expecting the total decline of the settlement due to a presumed lack of resources, I was surprised to find a vital and even upgraded village, now with newly installed infrastructure.  For the role of NUNW, s. Jauch (2015, pp. 345–346).  The 2008 internal evaluation was conducted with the support of social scientists from the UN and South Africa; s. Haarmann et al. (2009, introduction). 8 9

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

197

Not only did almost all households have access to electricity, but they were also provided with toilets, showers, and water pipes as part of a government housing project. Whereas I had expected the situation in Otjivero to have been deteriorated, people found new ways of how to survive under adverse conditions. These improvements were to be increased in the years to come.10 From an anthropological point of view, it showed that the Otjivero community had taken the right decision after all: using the BIG to invest into social networks ‘paid off’ in the long run as this was the only basis on which people had been able to rely after it expired. Until today, many receive remittances from relatives outside of the village, not least by those who benefitted from BIG allowances while the project was running. Far from being a deteriorating village, the number of inhabitants continued to increase. Next to remittances, the pensions for everyone above 60 years of age are a valuable source of income not only for the pensioners but for entire families.11 The money is distributed within families and neighbourhoods, thus allowing whole households to survive. Again, the village relied on the pensions of the elderly as in the years before the BIG was initiated. 5.2  Contested Authority Terminating the Basic Income Project in 2014 was, however, not the end of the story. In November 2014, government elections took place. The newly elected president of state, Hage Geingob, had long taken sides in favour of a Basic Income Grant and reopened the floor for debating. But instead of getting involved in another clash of authorities and power controversies, he took a rather circumspect decision: he called the then retired 10  In 2019, in addition to the infrastructural improvements within the settlement, a hostel for school children was built sponsored by the German Embassy thus further increasing the number of people with regular monthly income. Indirectly, the hostel makes the place more attractive for households outside the village to place their children there. Since many of them have relatives in the village they regularly visit the settlement bringing gifts and money with them. 11  For many beneficiaries, the pensions are the first regular monthly income in years, coming close to a universal basic income grant with the only precondition of age. Pensions as non-contributory benefits to elderly citizens are highly appreciated ever since they were implemented in Namibia in 1973 to African Namibians, granted to white Namibians since the 1940s and first implemented in South Africa in 1928 (Devereux 2001; for pensions as a safety net, s. Morgan 1991). Pension money usually lags behind the inflation rate and wage increases but is brought into line with living expenses every few years.

198 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

Bishop Zephania Kameeta of the Lutheran Church into his cabinet, making him head of the newly created Ministry of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare. He thus left the issue to the Bishop while at the same time introducing a separate presidential social plan called the Harambee Prosperity Plan, focusing on combating poverty by the creation of jobs through economic growth and emergency assistance—without even mentioning a basic income.12 In addition, one of his first steps in office was to implement a food bank for the poor and—only ten days after taking office—announcing a 60% increase of old age pensions from 600  N$ (approximately 55 US$) to 1000 N$ (95 US$ per person and month)13 in addition to a 100% increase in the benefits to vulnerable children from 125 N$ to 250 N$ (c. 10 to 20 US$). As was to be expected, these measures were a resounding success all over the country, particularly among the elders, “praising Hage Geingob’s government for hearing their plight” and describing it as “a blessing from God”.14 To a considerable extend, this action increased the legitimacy of the newly elected government, the authority of the president of state, and the public perception of his personal integrity. He could claim to be the one who actively worked for the common good, caring for the old and the most vulnerable parts of the population. Demonstrating continued concerns over income issues and the situation of the poor, and not least in support of the newly appointed Minister of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare, they both declared, in a joint effort, a ‘war on poverty’. A countrywide promotional tour, comprehensively covered by the media, aroused great hopes. At this time, the scales had clearly tipped in favour of the president. On the strength of his sagacity and due to his professionalism, which clearly showed his experience with political agendas, he knew how to convince 12  The Harambe Prosperity Plan started in April 2016 and will be running until the year 2021; s. Keller (2017). 13  In 2016, the pensions were again raised to 1200 N$, equaling a 100% increase compared with 2014 when the BIG expired. 14  Two articles published in the national newspaper New Area, on April 1, 2015, announcing that “Elderly Rejoice Over New Pension Grant”, and “Senior Citizens Hail ‘HeavenSent’ Pension Increases”. The latter was based on interviews with Nama-Damara pensioners who regard the pension less as a political measure than a gift of God as did the Otjivero inhabitants when the BIG was first implemented, believing the then bishop to be the mediator (Klocke-Daffa 2017, p. 19).

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

199

the public without making too many concrete promises. His ability to make a claim to both performative and moral legitimacy prevailed—at least for the time being. Ever since then, the former bishop and newly elected minister Kameeta has been trying to put forward his ideas about a basic income grant, now on the other side of political power. He never did get Basic Income Grants through parliament but has instead been struggling to set up bureaucratic institutions for the implementation of the presidentially announced social and economic programs. Parts of the national media denoted Kameeta’s efforts unsatisfactory resulting in him being regularly found at the bottom of the media’s ranking of politicians and even held “unratable” (Interview M.H., September 6, 2017; see also Haarmann et  al. 2019a, p.  369). According to some of my interview partners well versed in the inner workings of government, the failing of the project was also owing to the fact that too many obstacles had to be overcome, such as indirect resistance by some of the administrative and political staff. Both constituted a serious opposition in Namibian governmental institutions behind the scenes: “The support staff did not help him […]. The civil servants always came up with some kind of excuse” and “failed to do the groundwork” (Interview M.D., September 24, 2019, pp.  57–58; Interview M.H., September 18, 2019, p. 44). At the same time, the president of the Republic started to express scepticism about the chances of a Basic Income Grant without openly denouncing the program, knowing that he had nothing to lose. Should it all fail, he would not be the first person to be blamed. 5.3  Political Allegiance, Loyalty, and Respect for the Elders One aspect of African politics rarely investigated in social and political sciences is the impact of personal loyalty and respect for political decisions. Individual freedom of conscience and personal convictions, held to be essential to any kind of democratic system, appear to be contested values when clashing with principles of political allegiance and personal loyalty. Elders by Namibian standards are entitled to be respected by the younger generation; traditional authorities and members of the ‘inner circle of power’ (however constituted) have a right to be obeyed for being in charge of the office; the head of state for being elected as the rightful representative of the country. This is even more significant when familial ties and forms of individual dependency underlie political relations as is often

200 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

the case in small population countries like Namibia. It proved to be a shrewd decision when, in 2016, the current president of state Hage Geingob founded the Presidential Council consisting of the former presidents Samuel Nujoma and Hifikepunye Pohamba, thus preserving their high status in power and preventing potential opposition from the only side that might challenge his power, namely the two former presidents.15 In view of intergenerational relations between the ‘younger elites and the old bearers of traditions’, Namibia is paradigmatic of what Aguilar has called “the politics of age and gerontocracy”, also to be found elsewhere in Africa (Aguilar 1998). A distinctive trait of intraparty relations is that open opposition by an individual person to the opinion of elders is neither heard nor heeded. Rather than taking criticism as a challenge and a potential chance for the better, it may arouse suspicion. By many, it will be conceived as disloyalty, ungratefulness, lack of political allegiance, and personal antagonism, which is potentially dangerous to the criticized. In return for respect and awe, however, political promotion and the granting of privileges can be expected—for those at the bottom of the career ladder, it might suffice ‘to be seen’ at the very least. In turn, the public conceives party members to be far above them, seemingly having access to power and—most importantly—government jobs to be procured for others (seekers being advised that ‘you must know someone’ as the best way to find a job). This kind of reciprocal exchange reproduces itself at all levels (see Fig.  3: Hierarchies and Allegiance), though with different intensity. Even extremely high-ranking people feel obligated to expedite governmental initiatives and individual donations for the needy in return for voters’ support. Leaders are expected to donate part of their income ‘out of their own pocket’ to charity organizations, as regularly reported in the press such as in a lead story of The Namibian in March 2017, reporting that President Geingob had donated 34% of his monthly income of approximately N$ 1.5 M per year (approximately 100.000 US$) to sponsor educational and social organizations.16 A few days earlier, a food donation was reported to have been given to a San group of Northern Namibia

 Allgemeine Zeitung, March 10, 2016.  The Namibian, March 13, 2017, heading “Government Rewards Politicians”, an article about a 6% salary increase for politicians. Again, in 2019, it was reported that he donated 20% to the foodbank which was established on his own initiative in 2016; s. Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20, 2019. 15 16

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

201

Fig. 3  Hierarchies and allegiance (Klocke-Daffa)

by a director of the Office of the Vice President, promising that the government would also build houses and a kindergarten for them.17 Personal and professional matters are not easily separated but conceptualized as a unique and indivisible whole. Without the separation of office and private person, those in charge of public positions are becoming public persons without an individual view—coming close to what Mauss called “la personne morale” (Mauss 1938; see also Beattie 1980; La Fontaine 1985, p. 124). The former head of state Samuel Nujoma (1990–2005), first president of independent Namibia and now called ‘founding father of the nation’, is said to have been notorious for this particular kind of mixed-values approach to politics, and he continued in this vein even after handing over the presidency. Having been one of SWAPO’s leaders while operating in exile, it was not only his personal charisma and advanced age that made others follow him but also the military obedience he demanded in political life, taking any kind of criticism as a personal affront. In almost total control of the party, he would shut up anyone who dared to express a different  The Namibian, March 1, 2017: “Gov to Help Omundaungilo San”.

17

202 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

opinion, publicly defaming opponents as ‘the rebels within the country’ and ‘those who stick out their heads’. His statements “made people freeze even in parliament” (Interview M.I., September 25, 2019, p.  66). Members of SWAPO organizations and cabinet members who had publicly expressed a view not in line with presidential directives were in danger of being openly rebuked or called into office for personal clarification. ‘The old man is looking for you’ was a running threat, particularly for younger party members. These meetings often ended with the order ‘I want a statement from you’—to be expedited promptly, even against one’s own convictions (according to M.I, September 25, 2019, p. 67). Those working on further career steps had no choice other than to accept this kind of expected submissiveness, as did those who personally depended on presidential favours. Nujoma’s last terms of office are said to have been characterized by his increasingly autocratic leadership style, his conceitedness demonstrated at public appearances, and the ever-growing cult around his person (Melber 2015, pp. 73–75) to a point where he seems to have turned into a living ancestor and become almost sacrosanct.18 However, to blame this peculiar form of political behaviour on a single person does not paint the whole picture. Loyalty networks are a structural element of power. More than individual choice, respect and allegiance are considered by Namibians to be indispensable for successful political work. Departing from the official party line will thus bring about sanctions. “If you are not in line with SWAPO or have a different opinion from the elders or your superiors, the entire institutional network will be against you” (Interview M.I., September 25, 2019, p. 65). Individual members with different opinions, ambitious and critical minds pushing ahead with creative counter-proposals to political agendas, must be prepared to be either ignored, muzzled, and politically ditched or indeed barred by their party (Interview H.H., August 18, 2019).19 Some may relinquish their 18  According to Schulze (2020, p. 283), it was Nujoma himself who significantly contributed to creating his public image as ‘father of the nation’ and icon of resistance. 19  Such was the case with a number of renegade SWAPO members who joined the Landless Peoples Movement criticizing government land policy. SWAPO seniors accused them for not showing respect towards their superiors and announced disciplinary measures because of misconduct (s. The Namibian, March 7, 2017: “SWAPO Targets ‘Rebels’ ”). The measures resulted, among other actions, in suspending Job Amupenda, Secretary for Information, Publicity and Mobilisation of the SWAPO Youth League, in 2014. The Allgemeine Zeitung of the German-speaking minority in Namibia referred to this as an act of “Collective disenfranchisement […]. Then the comrades will know: Now our foremost duty is again for loy-

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

203

high office and wait in the back for their chance to come. ‘You just kept quiet’ (in Afrikaans: Jy moet net still bly) is a standard behavioural norm and an accepted code of conduct characterizing asymmetrical relationships in politics as well as in the social sphere. This may turn out to be a suitable strategy, but in many cases the only way out is to found a new political party together with other dissenters from inside and supporters from outside. Discipline without the possibility to rebel may lead to stagnation rather than innovation. It is in fact the enforced shutdown strategy of SWAPO party discipline that many ambitious young people complain about. The idea of discussing freely and accepting constructive critique without suppressing individual opinions has certainly been at the base of many newly founded political initiatives— as with the All People’s Party founded in 2008. However, the explicit aim to debate the ideas, not the person, may quickly revert to established patterns of negotiation and power based on rank. It’s not the act that counts but loyalty to the person. “You are expected to obey and do what you are told” (Interview M.I., September 25, 2019, p.  64). In no way must authorities be outshone by subordinates, not even by those in high positions. Members of political parties or public institutions financed by the government such as administrations, parastatals, schools and universities, as well as those affiliated with the government such as trade unions, should not publicly present opposing ideas or look for support from outside, since this is clearly taken as a sign of disloyalty. It is in this context of allegiance, respect, and self-interest that the highest representatives of the trade unions, though being members of the BIG coalition, opted out of the project once presidential support ceased. It became evident that Namibian trade unions exhibit similar structures to politics—even though conceptualized as a counterbalance.20 The most promising strategy of silencing internal and external critics is to ‘catch them’ by offering prestigious jobs, monetary benefits, modern offices in the capital, staff cars, and

alty, obedience, adaptation, and subordination” (Allgemeine Zeitung, March 14, 2017; translation by the author). 20  In pre-independent Namibia, the trade union federation NUNW was closely affiliated to SWAPO and considered its ‘strong arm’. This legacy caused tremendous tensions among members of the union after independence when SWAPO became the ruling party of the country threatening the political autonomy of trade unions (s. Murray and Wood 1997, pp. 188–192, on the political affiliation of NUMW in the 1990s; s. also Sycholt and Klerck 2010, pp. 210–212, on “inherited constraints”).

204 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

access to farm land.21 The price is to keep calm and carry on without attracting attention—or waiting for the right chance to come. Good people are usually quickly out because they get into arguments with others. You may not go against your superiors. That is really frustrating. We actually should provide service to our members in the trade unions and serve the people. But many in the trade unions only care for their own career and always look for a good job in government. (Interview H.S., September 19, 2020, p. 36)

Appearance in public is a performance of hierarchy and subordination referring to who speaks first and who comes last, who is driving in an open car or is eligible to sit on the roofed tribune during public ceremonies.22 From the onset, it must be perfectly clear that the person highest in status is at the forefront, presenting whatever new project needs to be introduced to the public and claiming it was all his (or her) idea. Admitting authorship by another person would challenge the position and the authority of the one in power.23 Following this logic, it becomes comprehensible that groundbreaking news on public services will be either directly announced to the media by the head of state or launched by other channels such as the news on the increase of pensions in 2015—which was indeed a great release to the elderly—was put through to the press indicating that it was the president’s decision just hours before the official presentation of the annual budget for the financial year 2015/2016 by the secretary of finances.24 Among the few who would publicly express criticism of the government or individual power-holders without fear of negative career consequences are those SWAPO expats and scientists who work abroad, such as Henning Melber. His press release of 2015 following his latest book 21  Farms for sale must be offered to the government before putting them on the market. This program was originally meant to provide the poor rural population with land at affordable prices. However, many of the farms which have been sold during the past 20 years were bought by politicians or civil servants and their relatives, due to easy access and financial resources. 22  It needs further research to look into potential cultural connotations to find out whether political subordination is undisputed among all Namibian groups including San groups, who are known to favor social equality over political hierarchy. 23  It should be interesting to investigate potential gender specific aspects of this kind of performance. 24  Allgemeine Zeitung, April 1, 2015, “Haushalt mit sozialem Fokus”.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

205

(Melber 2015) was a critical assessment of Pohamba’s ten years in office but published in the German newspaper which is read only by a minority of the population.25 He characterized him as a remarkable president who stood out mostly for being unremarkable.26 For those in charge of departments and projects to be implemented within Namibia, the established structures and widely recognized models of getting things done are known—acting against the system is always a challenging endeavour. The then Bishop Zephania Kameeta of ELCRN who was to become the chairperson of the BIG knew about the procedures in politics since he himself was a member of the ruling political party and had held different political positions, most recently that of vice president of parliament (1999–2000). He admitted: The one thing was that, before starting something like that [the BIG], you must talk to the government, to the traditional authorities and they must also give their green light and not only the chairperson. So that caused a little bit of a problem because with quite a number of traditional authorities it was always the question what the government would say about it. There was a suspicion in the country that you can’t do something that the government is not supporting. (Interview, Kameeta, August 6, 2018, 51:30)

The project was nevertheless initiated. Looking at the urgent needs of the village certainly had a strong impact on the Lutheran Church’s decision in favour of the BIG as well as encouraging support from some other leading church members and last but not least external scientists and the international community of the ‘Basic Income Earth Network’. However, it became clear very soon that neither President Nujoma who was in office in the run-up to the scheme nor his then SWAPO vice president and later successor in office Pohamba were much in favour of the BIG. Things got worse when a delegation from Brazil (where the debate on income grants at that time was ongoing) visited Otjivero and professed to be quite impressed at a later meeting with President Pohamba—who was taken aback as it wasn’t he who had invited them. “That was probably the final clash between the two authorities” (Interview H.H., July 8, 2017). 25  Allgemeine Zeitung, March 20, 2015, “Die Ära von Präsident Pohamba—eine kritische Bilanz”. 26  S. also Melber (2016) on the ‘era Pohamba’.

206 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

With the two main political figures as opponents, many of their immediate subordinates within the political/governmental hierarchy appeared sceptical or were openly against the BIG, using similar arguments about the outcome of granting money without seeing any benefit in return. Kameeta, the subsequent Minister of Poverty Eradication later commented: There was a lot of criticism, but I was not very much disturbed. I heard also criticism from the government. In fact, I clashed with the former president. He felt that I was disrespectful. He was shocked and said ‘you as a bishop are encouraging people to receive money just for doing nothing’ and I said ‘Mr. President, that’s how Africans are talking. We are talking about us as we would do before independence.’ But he didn’t like it […]. And that is what kept on because of that resistance but I was really not very much disappointed. (Interview, Kameeta, August 6, 2018, 24:30)

Acting against the system was indeed a daring venture given the fact that it could well cause irritation, mistrust, and open confrontation not least because of perceived disloyalty. The appointment to minister of the former bishop Zephania Kameeta in 2015 again raised expectations for change for the better. However, four years later hopes for a nationwide Basic Income in Namibia had not materialized and in fact seemed to be withering away even though there had been every opportunity: a newly elected president who had once declared himself in favour of the BIG, a newly appointed minister as former front man of the BIG, now with the power to implement it and a broad base of support from within the 14 regions of the country: “There was this general call of people that they wanted BIG” (Interview H.D., September 24, 2019, p. 58). Critics blame it on the personal failure of the minister for not acting with the appropriate vigour and assertiveness. From the perspective of the year 2019, many of the Otjivero inhabitants are said to have lost confidence as do many donors (Interview H.G., September 11, 2019, p.  3; Interview H.J., September 18, 2019, p.  42), but this assessment could generally not be verified among inhabitants of the settlement who still trust in their former bishop and rely on his moral authority (and would call him ‘Bishop Kameeta’). Whether the failed BIG continuation is to be interpreted as a poorly organized manoeuvre of no avail or a cultural mechanism of respect and loyalty towards former and current superiors in government remains an open question. The failure of implementing a nationwide basic income

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

207

was accompanied by less spectacular actions which did not threaten political hierarchies but nevertheless did have an impact on the general social situation. Among these were the implementation of the food bank (serving about 40,000 people up to 2019) and the steady increase of pensions in the post-BIG years. “After all, he did his job”—even the press attested to his good performance, though failing to implement BIG (Interview H.H., September 18, 2019, p. 32). The minister himself kept a low profile, never seeking the limelight by trying to compete with his political superiors.

6   It’s Not Yet the End of BIG: Negotiating Social Protection Policy and Authority The moral legitimacy of a man of the church should not be underestimated in a country with a predominantly Christian population. For a man who considered all the public offices he held as a responsibility towards God, it might have been the right strategy to leave the door open to further negotiations by ‘keeping quiet’ in an arena of institutionalized subordination. Pushing through own ideas against all odds was not the way he chose. As a member of the ‘inner circle of power’ among politicians and church members and with the authority of an elder, Zephania Kameeta is entitled to loyalty, respect, and obedience as do others in similar positions. In return, the ‘war on poverty’, launched together with the president of State, did bring benefits for the needy. Food bank donations, and many of the social benefits have been co-organized through the Ministry of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare. And following the president’s example, a donations account was opened by the minister with a starting balance from his own resources, thus following demands from the poor that the wealthy should also ‘take out money from their own pocket’ to give to the needy.27 The conception of power within the ruling party which entails loyalty to the individual and following accepted leaders for better or worse was not what Kameeta was willing to accept for himself. Being opposed to established patterns of individual promotion in return for political allegiance, the number of former comrades and colleagues, followers and subordinates accompanying the former bishop to the newly found ministry 27  Allgemeine Zeitung, March 3, 2017, “Armutsbekämpfung des Ministeriums für Armutsbekämpfung und Sozialfürsorge”.

208 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

was not worth mentioning. For him, what counted was loyalty to the cause. Some of those who had been ready to follow him to the new office criticized that they had never been asked, and indeed it might have made things easier. “He could have taken a team with him to support him, but he didn’t do that and then failed to deliver” (Interview H.D., September 24, 2019). Due to his rather bad performance during the first years in office, Kameeta at times ran the risk of losing his moral authority even among close followers. Nevertheless, as the person in charge of Social Welfare and convinced of the righteousness of the cause he is fighting for, all attacks and allegations against him do not seem to have much impact on his position within SWAPO, possibly for leaving the question of internal hierarchies undisputed. But again, there is support from internal and external experts representing a special kind of authoritative knowledge. From that side, there is continued support and sympathy for the cause and Kameeta is said to refer preferably to this kind of expertise. Scientific publications on basic income studies have been regularly issued28 and a new publication as a follow-up to the Otjivero-BIG was launched (Haarmann et  al. 2019b). Despite ongoing critical comments (Osterkamp 2014), the time may have come for a basic income in Namibia,29 though not necessarily as a universal unconditional grant. What can be called a ‘sympathy-based relationship structure’ may in the end prevail over crude power relations since a new Social Protection Plan for the unemployed has been discussed recently and was published in draft form (Republic of Namibia 2018). It proposes a monthly allowance of 300 N$ (about 20 US$) to everybody between 30 and 59  years of age with a yearly income below 50,000  N$. For some opaque reason, younger people below the age of 30 (making up for a substantial percentage of the population) are left out. This was vigorously debated in 2019, from the moment the draft was presented to the public.30 Nevertheless, a large part of the adult population would benefit. The allowance would indeed come close to a basic income grant. For its supporters, “it is our last chance”. For Kameeta, the former frontman of BIG  See the latest articles in the journal Basic Income Studies, 2006 and following volumes.  Reed and Lansley (2016); s. also Haarmann et al. (2019a) and other contributions in Torry (2019). 30  New Era Online, September 20, 2019, “Namibia’s New Social Protection Policy: A Chance to Close the Gaps”, interview with Herbert Jauch, chairperson of the Economic and Social Justice Trust. 28 29

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

209

and current Minister of Poverty Eradication, it signifies some kind of satisfaction and allows for holding on to the idea: We are including it also into this new proposal of the social protection program. Now, what we came up with, the government, we had a very serious discussion and also with the basic income grant coalition. We said let’s look at the tax—those who are compelled to pay tax and those who are not. If you are receiving 50.000 NAM as income per year then you don’t pay tax. If you are above that you pay tax. So we said let’s look on that. Let us look at the statistics. The discussion with the statistics people was saying that about 300.000 Namibians are completely vulnerable. I think the number must be higher. They were very sympathetic. I said we should at least put it 500.000 Namibians. We are still negotiating but we said there are these Namibians who are receiving these different grants, veterans’ grants, old age grants, vulnerable children and so forth. But you have people who are not old people, they are not disabled, they are not regarded as vulnerable because “vulnerable” is more regarded as children with learning disabilities and all these things—disability is a problem in itself. But we said there are so many Namibians who do not fit in this kind of category, and we believe they should get a special grant as a basic income. […] So we really discussed that this proposal is a part of the re-structuring of the social protection issue. So, I said I will keep all my ideas. I expect the end of my term in 2020 and I hope that by that time something happened, even if it only [helps] 300.000 or 500.000 people—that at least these people get it. (Interview September 6, 2018, 13:30–17:40).

Again, both pros and cons have been put forward regarding social protection grants for the unemployed. The authors of an OECD paper published in 2019—thus representing the external authority of an international institution—were not too enthusiastic about a general social protection scheme but pleaded instead to “consolidate rather than universalize” and proposed that Namibia “first develop a financing strategy for social protection”. The idea of a groundbreaking flagship project for the redistribution of national resources did not seem to be appealing. They concluded: In financial terms, the most significant reforms to social protection in Namibia might occur in social insurance, both in pensions and health insurance. (Schade et al. 2019, p. 46)

This might be an option for future generations, but given Namibia’s currently high unemployment rates, a large percentage of the population

210 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

does not have the means for living, let alone for paying any social insurance.31 Interesting enough and despite all external experts favouring private investigations, the original concept of unconditional basic income grants resurfaced in different form. With it, the power play between moral authorities, political powers, and scientific expertise entered a new stage in the ongoing process of challenged legitimacies. In February 2020, the Namibian government issued a press release to the international press: “The Namibian government commissioned a feasibility study meant to determine whether the country can introduce a basic income grant (BIG) to benefit roughly 1.2 million people”.32 Representing the moral legitimacy of a former bishop and the political power of an elder statesman, the Minister of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare Zephania Kameeta declared that “BIG is part of the government’s Social Protection Policy that has already been drafted and needs to be finalized”.33 The change of authority is indeed striking—from a pre-BIG moral authority to a legitimate but non-authoritative and much ridiculed political hanger he might become a post-BIG icon of social change. In the meantime, the old and new president of state, Hage Geingob, once called “the hope for the future”, lost more than 30% of his former share of the vote in the 2019 national elections due to corruption allegations, economic recession, and growing poverty.34 So, within the contested fields of power, we may ask: Whose authority counts? Whose claims prevail?

7   Conclusion: Lessons on Authority and Legitimacy Coming back to my research question presented at the beginning of this chapter addressing the impact of contested authority and legitimacies on political negotiations, the empirical findings of the Namibian pilot project may be of general concern for analysis. First, there are the individual actors supporting or opposing the cause, many times in pursuit of own political ambitions and sensitivities beyond the actual project. Equally 31  The only types of insurance which are affordable are private funeral insurance and government-paid funeral costs (Klocke-Daffa 2016). 32  News Ghana, February 16, 2020, “Namibia Commissions Feasibility Study on Basic Income Grant”. 33  Ibid. 34  The Guardian, December 1, 2019.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

211

significant—and many times neglected in political research—are the hidden dimensions of power-making that may prove to be part of cultural scripts such as respect for the elders, obedience to superiors, and loyalty to those setting the agenda even against own convictions as well as internal resistance to established forms of authority. A third factor to be taken into consideration is the impact of national as well as external experts in support of an idea or policy deemed right or wrong from the political, social, or economic point of view. Given Africa’s financial dependency on international donors, these experts represent a special kind of authority and claim legitimacy in having a say on policy design in an ever more globalized world. Their influence at first sight looks significant but may be overestimated when we consider other facets in the process. What does seem to be decisive is the operating of alternative authorities acting side by side and going along with different forms of legitimacy-claiming by actors or institutions which may well change roles in the process of decision-­making. It must be left to further research whether this kind of role change which many times leads to political statement and intransparent decisions of power-holders would equally count as an element of counterbalance. To understand the ambiguities and (re-)negotiations of the ongoing disputes over the Namibian Basic Income it proved necessary to look into the ongoing processes from a holistic perspective. Following J. Michael Williams (2010, p. 21), the moral legitimacy Kameeta could draw on was connected to his office as a bishop and the just cause he stood up for intrepidly. Things changed when the performative legitimacy of his actions were challenged by the then president of state and legitimate leader of the nation claimed that it was not serving the common good. Both sides have been engaging national supporters as well as external experts for strategic reasons, but a closer look reveals that this was not the decisive part in the ongoing power-play of the main figures. After the newly elected president of State Geingob nominated Kameeta as minister, roles and authority changed again. What at first came close to a form of ‘actively authorized’ power within an accepted hierarchical relationship, following Myers’ (2008, p. 81) definition of delegated authority, turned into a clash of loyalties for Kameeta when the official support for the project declined. Since political power is closely attached to personal allegiance, the claiming of legitimacy for the ‘just cause’ became precarious. However, things have meanwhile again changed in favour of the project. What showed to be a clash of authorities in the first phase and a clash of loyalties in the second may now merge into contested but not incompatible forms of legitimacies.

212 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

What can we learn from this case study? Beyond all political quarrels and disputes of the international scientific community, decisions on political policies are taken by individual actors (or groups of actors) not un-­ affected by behavioural norms and culture-specific requirements of what acceptable leadership should be. People want their representatives to be persons of integrity committed to the common good. This is all the more true when power relies on reciprocal support structures, but ‘support’ may be expected from all sides, legitimacy may be acknowledged or denied and the recognition of authority withdrawn—turning all concepts into overlapping and volatile categories. Three aspects should be given special attention for further research: • Coping with power depends heavily on individual actors manoeuvring within or around hierarchies of authority. • Public perception of legitimacy—as much as it may change—has an impact on political processes reflecting these dynamics. • Sources of authority may be found outside of individual abilities or democratic authorization. If we want to find out more about it, we have to look deeper into what Ingold called the “meshwork” of relations (Ingold 2007, p. 212) that is the interconnectedness of interests, actors, and concepts. To put it in J.  Michael William’s words: “We are only just beginning to understand how people at the local level manage to make sense of and give meaning to different sources of authority” (Williams 2010, p. 218).

References Aguilar, Mario L. (Ed.) (1998). The Politics of Age and Gerontocracy in Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Bauer, Martin W. / Pansegau, Petra / Shukla, Rajesh (2019). Image, Perception and Cultural Authority of Science: By Way of Introduction. In: Bauer, Martin W. / Pansegau, Petra / Shukla, Rajesh (Eds.), The Cultural Authority of Science: Comparing Across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. London: Routledge, pp. 3–21. Beattie, John (1980). Review Article: Representations of the Self in Traditional Africa—La Notion de Personne en Afrique Noire. In: Africa, 50 (3), pp. 313–320.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

213

Bennett, Tom W. (1998): The Constitutional Base of Traditional Rulers in South Africa. In: d’Engelbronner-Kolff, Franka M. / Hinz, Manfred O. / Sindamo, J. L. (Eds.), Traditional Authority and Democracy in Southern Africa. Proceedings from the Workshop Traditional Authorities in the Nineties— Democratic Aspects of Traditional Government in Southern Africa, 15–16 November 1995, Windhoek. Windhoek: New Namibia Books, pp. 14–30. Bernstein, Steven / Coleman, William D. (2009). Introduction: Autonomy, Legitimacy, and Power in an Era of Globalization. In: Bernstein, Steven / Coleman, William D. (Eds.), Unsettled Legitimacy. Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 1–29. Buys, G. L. / Nambala, Shekutaamba V. V. (2003). History of the Church in Namibia 1805–1990. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan. Comaroff, John L. / Comaroff, Jean (2018). The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cook, S. E. / Hardin, R. (2013). Performing Royalty in Contemporary Africa. In: Cultural Anthropology, 28 (2), pp. 227–251. d’Engelbronner-Kolff, Franka M. / Hinz, Manfred O. / Sindamo, J. L. (Eds.) (1998). Traditional Authority and Democracy in Southern Africa. Proceedings from the Workshop Traditional Authorities in the Nineties—Democratic Aspects of Traditional Government in Southern Africa, 15–16 November 1995, Windhoek. Windhoek: New Namibia Books. Devereux, Stephen (2001). Social Pensions in Namibia and South Africa. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Folkwang, Jude / Dingbobga, Thaddeus (2009). Mediating Legitimacy: Chieftaincy and Democratisation in Two African Chiefdoms. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG. Foucault, Michel (1991). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Friedman, Steven (2018). Power in Action: Democracy, Citizenship and Social Justice. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Graeber, David (2007). Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Haarmann, Claudia / Haaarmann, Dirk / Nattras, Nicoli (2019a). The Namibian Basic Income Grant Pilot. In: Torry, Malcolm (Ed.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 357–372. Haarmann, Claudia / Haarmann, Dirk / Unaeb, Engelhardt / Jauch, Herbert (2019b). Basic Income Grant: Otjivero, Namibia—10 Years Later. Windhoek: Economic and Social Justice Trust. Haarmann, Claudia (2015). Relief Through Cash: Impact Assessment of Emergency Cash Grant in Namibia. Retrieved from http://www.bignam.org/

214 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

Publications/Relief_through_cash_Impact_assessment_of_the_emergency_ cash_grant_in_Namibia.pdf Haarmann, Claudia / Haarmann, Dirk (2012). Namibia: Seeing the Sun Rise— The Realities and Hopes of the Basic Income Grant Pilot Project. In: Murray, Matthew C. / Pateman, Carole (Eds.), Basic Income Worldwide: Horizons of Reform. Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 33–58. Haarmann, Claudia et  al. (2009). Making the Difference! Basic Income Grant Pilot Project Assessment Report 2009. Windhoek: NANGOF. Haarmann, Claudia et  al. (2008): Towards a Basic Income Grant for All! Pilot Project Assessment Report 2008. Windhoek: NANGOF. Haarmann, Claudia / Haarmann, Dirk (2005). The Basic Income Grant in Namibia Resource Book. Windhoek: ELCRN Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia. Hinz, Manfred O. (1998). The ‘Traditional’ of Traditional Government: Traditional versus Democracy-Based Legitimacy. In: d’Engelbronner-Kolff, Franka M. / Hinz, Manfred O. / Sindano, J. L. (Eds.), Traditional Authority and Democracy in Southern Africa: Proceedings form the Workshop Traditional Authorities in the Nineties—Democratic Aspects of Traditional Government in Southern Africa, 15–16 November 1995, Windhoek. Windhoek: New Namibia Books, pp. 1–13. Index Mundi (2019). GINI Index (World Bank estimate)—Country Ranking Retrieved from https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV. GINI/rankings Ingold, Tim (2007). Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Jauch, Herbert (2015). The Rise and Fall of the Basic Income Grant Campaign: Lessons from Namibia. In: Global Labour Journal, 6 (3), pp. 336–349. Keller, Thomas (2017). Der Harambee Prosperity Plan: Papiertiger oder potentieller Entwicklungsmotor für Namibia. Länderbericht Namibia. Bonn: Konrad-­ Adenauer-­ Stiftung. Retrieved from https://www.kas.de/documents/ 252038/253252/7_dokument_dok_pdf_49475_1.pdf/26e96184-­3 3ad-­ e4de-­d9da-­a6717132901f?version=1.0&t=1539648887252. Kessel, Ineke von / Oomen, Barbara (1997). One Chief, One Vote: The Revival of Traditional Authorities in Post-Apartheid South Africa. In: African Affairs, 96, pp. 561–585. Klocke-Daffa, Sabine (2017). Contested Claims to Social Welfare: Basic Income Grants in Namibia. In: Sozialpolitik.ch, 2, Article 2.3, pp.  1–26. Retrieved from https://www.sozialpolitik.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/2017_2_Article_ KLocke-­Daffa.pdf. Klocke-Daffa, Sabine (2016). “On the Safe Side of Life”: Cultural Appropriations of Funeral Insurances in Namibia. In: Prager, Laila / Prager, Michel / Sprenger, Guido (Eds.), Parts and Wholes: Essays on Social Morphology, Cosmology, and Exchange in Honour of J. D. M. Platenkamp. Berlin: Lit, pp. 203–218.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

215

Klocke-Daffa, Sabine (2012). Is BIG Big Enough? Basic Income Grant in Namibia: An Anthropological Inquiry. Tübingen: University of Tübingen. Retrieved from http://tobias-­lib.uni-­tuebingen.de/frontdoor.php?source_opus=6160. Kössler, Reinhard (1998). On the Vindicatory Politics of the Witbooi in Southern Namibia 1915–1995. In: d’Engelbronner-Kolff, Franka M. / Hinz, Manfred O. / Sindamo, J. L. (Eds.), Traditional Authority and Democracy in Southern Africa: Proceedings from the Workshop Traditional Authorities in the Nineties—Democratic Aspects of Traditional Government in Southern Africa, 15–16 November 1995, Windhoek. Windhoek: New Namibia Books, pp. 31–61. Krämer, Mario (2020). Neotraditional Authority Contested: The Corporatization of Tradition and the Quest for Democracy in the Topnaar Traditional Authority, Namibia. In: Africa, 90 (2), pp. 318–338. Krämer, Mario (2019). Violence, Autochthony, and Identity Politics in KwaZulu-­ Natal (South Africa): A Processual Perspective on Local Political Dynamics. In: African Studies Review, 63 (3), pp. 540–559. Künzler, Daniel / Nollert, Michael (2017). Varieties and Drivers of Social Welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Critical Assessment. In: Sozialpolitik.ch, 2, article 2.1., pp. 1–23. Retrieved from: https://www.sozialpolitik.ch/fileadmin/user_ upload/2017_2_Article_Kuenzler_Nollert.pdf. La Fontaine, J. S. (1985). Person and Individual: Some Anthropological Reflections. In: Carrithers, Michael / Collins, Steven / Lukes, Steven (Eds.), The Category of the Person—Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, pp. 123–140. Lang, Andrea Marianne (2004). Traditionelle Herrschaft in Südafrika: Anpassungsstrategien und Aushandlungen in einem demokratischen Staat. University Dissertation. Bielefeld: University of Bielefeld. Mauss, Marcel (1938). Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de ‘moi’. In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 68, pp. 263–282. Melber, Henning (2016). A Decade of Namibia—Politics, Economy and Society: The Era Pohamba, 2004–2015. Leiden: Brill. Melber, Henning (2015). Namibia—gesellschaftspolitische Erkundigungen seit der Unabhängigkeit. Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel. Miescher, Giorgio (1999). The Political Significance of the Press and Public Radio (NBC) in Post-Colonial Namibia. Basel: Basler Afrika-Bibliographien. Morgan, Richard (1991). State Pensions as an Income Safety Net in Namibia. In: Food Policy, 16 (5), pp. 351–359. Murray, Andrew / Wood, Geoffrey (1997). The Namibian Trade Union Movement: Trends, Practices and Shopfloor Perception. In: Klerck, Gilton / Murray, Andrew / Sycholt, Martin (Eds.), Continuity and Change: Labour Relations in Independent Namibia. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan, pp. 159–199.

216 

S. KLOCKE-DAFFA

Myers, J. C. (2008). Indirect Rule in South Africa: Tradition, Modernity, and the Costuming of Political Power. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Oloruntoba, Samuel Ojo (2018). Political Parties and Democratic Development in Africa: Nigeria and South Africa in Comparative Perspective. In: Adejumobi, Said (Ed.), Voice and Power in Africa’s Democracy: Institutions, Participation and Accountability. London: Routledge, pp. 97–114. Oomen, Barbara (2008). Chiefs! Law, Power & Culture in Contemporary South Africa. In: Geschiere, Peter / Meyer, Birgit / Pels, Peter (Eds.), Readings in Modernity in Africa. Oxford: James Currey, pp. 80–84. Osterkamp, Rigmar (2014). Should Income Grants in Poor Countries be Conditional or Unconditional? In: Homo Oeconomicus, 31 (1/2), pp. 203–224. Reed, Howard / Lansley, Steward (2016). Universal Basic Income: An Idea Whose Time Has Come? London: Compass. Republic of Namibia (2018). Social Protection Plan—Draft. Windhoek: Ministry of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare. Retrieved from http://www.mpesw. gov.na/documents/227474/356397/Draft+Social+Protection+Policy/ ebffdb18-­771c-­445c-­a0e0-­5c60a2064a68. Rothe, Andreas (2010). Media system and news selections in Namibia. Münster: LIT. Schade, Klaus / La, Justina / Pick, Alexander (2019). Financing Social Protection in Namibia. OECD Development Policy Papers, 19. Retrieved from https:// www.oecd-­ilibrary.org/docserver/6957c65a-­en.pdf?expires=1612860407&id =id&accname=guest&checksum=86168920FD5EB4A1D97A96 AE13F293DA. Schubert, Jon (2010). ‘Democratisation’ and the Consolidation of Political Authority in Post-War Angola. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 36 (3), pp. 657–672. Schulze, Matthias F. J. (2020). Nach dem Krieg: Staatliche Erinnerungskultur, Kulturelles Erbe und Generationenkonflikte in Namibia seit 1990. University Dissertation. Tübingen: University of Tübingen. Sycholt, Martin / Klerck, Gilton (2010). The State and Labour Relations: Walking the Tightrope between Corporalism and Neo-Liberalism. In: Keulder, Christiaan (Ed.), State, Society and Democracy: A Reader in Namibian Politics. (First published in 2000) Windhoek: Macmillan Education Namibia, pp. 200–235. Torry, Malcolm (Ed.) (2019). The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Ubink, Janine. (2008). Traditional Authorities in Africa: Resurgence in an Era of Democratisation. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Weber, Max (1922): Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, III.  Abteilung: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr.

  CONTESTED AUTHORITIES 

217

Williams, Michael J. (2010). Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Zenker, Olaf / Höhne, Markus V. (2018). Processing the Paradox: When the State Has to Deal with Customary Law. In: Zenker, Olaf / Hoehne, Markus V. (Eds.), The State and the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 1–40.

Challenging Neotraditional Authority in Namibia Mario Krämer

1   Introduction In his book on Indirect Rule in South Africa, Jason C. Myers (2008, p. xii) starts with what he identifies as a central question of political philosophy: “To whom should political authority be granted and why should such authority be respected and obeyed?” Myers’ answer to the first part of the question is that only those who are actively authorized by others may exert power in a hierarchical relationship; authority thus “indicates a hierarchical relationship whose existence is agreed upon by the parties involved in it” (Myers 2008, p.  80). More precisely, Myers makes use of the term ‘delegated authority’, that is, the deliberate passing of power between different actors. What is crucial is the deliberate nature of this act: it is not simply the presence of power that authorizes an actor but the consensual transfer of power from one to another. Myers calls this process “active authorization” (2008, p. 81). This understanding of authority is more or less based on a perspective Hannah Arendt (1956) presented after the

M. Krämer (*) University of Köln, Köln, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_8

219

220 

M. KRÄMER

Second World War and which has recently been taken up again by Frank Furedi (2013): the basic argument is that authority lends power legitimacy and meaning. Very broadly, we may distinguish at least two other, contrasting perspectives on the relationship between authority and power: Peter Skalnik (1999) and Patrick Chabal (2009) claim that authority is different from power, whereas Heinrich Popitz (2017, 1992) and Wolfgang Sofsky and Rainer Paris (1994) argue that authority is a specific form of power. In the following, I will elaborate on these three theoretical perspectives on authority and link them to a case study of neotraditional authority in Namibia. More precisely, I deal with the challenging of neotraditional leadership by young community activists in the Topnaar Traditional Authority in the Erongo region. This ‘youth uprising’ serves as an example for the general academic and public debate on the power and legitimacy of neotraditional authority in Southern Africa (see e.g. Claassens 2014; Comaroff and Comaroff 2018; Krämer 2016; LiPuma and Koelble 2009; Mamdani 1996; Ntsebeza 2005; Oomen 2005; Williams 2010). In my understanding, ‘tradition’ is not a matter of an objective length of time—that is, how long a community, institution, or practice has effectively existed; rather, it “constitutes a discourse by which people assert present interests in terms of the past”, as Spear (2003, p. 6) makes clear. Hence, ‘neotraditionalism’ is a conflictual process of tradition being reinterpreted and reconstructed by rulers and subjects alike to gain power, authority, legitimacy, and access to resources. The adjective ‘neotraditional’ thus refers to the fact that neither in Africa nor elsewhere does a ‘traditional authority’ exist that has not been transformed—and has not transformed itself—under colonial or postcolonial rule. This chapter deals with the general question in how far the authority of neotraditional leaders is accepted or contested and asks more specifically what the challenging of neotraditional authority means for the actors involved and how they make sense of it. The argument is that—contrary to the idea that neotraditional authority is entirely delegitimized in Southern Africa (Mamdani 1996; Ntsebeza 2005)—even those subjects who challenge neotraditional leadership distinguish between office and incumbent. Hence, the case study of the ‘Topnaar youth uprising’ illustrates that rather than eradicating neotraditional authority per se, the main objective of the rebellious youth was to criticize and modify existing power relations.

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

221

2   What Is ‘Authority’? Three Theoretical Perspectives More than half a century ago, Hannah Arendt (1956) diagnosed a complete loss of authority in the ‘modern world’: authority as such has been radically questioned and is (almost) non-existent. In her view, authority forms a trinity together with religion and tradition and all three are inseparable, that is, without religion and/or tradition authority fights a lost cause. However, Arendt points out that without authority neither a well-­ ordered polity nor education is possible because authority creates stability and continuity. Furthermore, Arendt claims that authority and freedom are not opposites but that the former is a prerequisite for the latter: one task of authority has always been to limit freedom and thus to preserve it. What, then, is the relationship between authority, power, violence, and legitimacy from Arendt’s point of view? Violence is incompatible with both authority and power, whereas the latter two have a more or less close relationship. For Arendt, violence is never legitimate and is always under pressure to justify itself; where violence rules, power is absent and vice versa. Power does not reside in the hands of an individual, but he or she is empowered by a group of people; it is the capability to act in concert, Arendt (1970) argues. Therefore, power is always in need of legitimacy— and legitimacy is lent by authority. In Arendt’s view, authority excludes the use of force on the one hand, and is thus different from violence, but it is also incompatible with persuasion on the other hand, because it is a hierarchical phenomenon in principle. In other words, authority is founded on reciprocal and voluntary recognition in a hierarchical relationship. More recently, Frank Furedi (2013, p. 408) claims that “[h]ow relations of authority are constituted and challenged in the twenty-first century is one of the big issues facing the social sciences”. Hence, Myers’ crucial question as to whether chiefs have legitimacy is not just a particularly (Southern) African debate but part of a general concern with ‘the problem of authority’ in contemporary democratic societies. Furedi claims that negative conceptions of authority replaced positive affirmations in Western democracies over the course of the twentieth century (2013, p. 384). Similar to Arendt, authority is not simply the same as power from his point of view, but it is rather the meaning given to power, that is, authority gives power clarity and direction. Furedi also sees a clear link between authority and legitimacy: an authority must be accepted and legitimate. Richard Sennett (1980, p.  20) acknowledges a similar problem with

222 

M. KRÄMER

authority in modern societies. In contrast to Furedi, he, however, argues that authority is not necessarily legitimate and unlike Max Weber (1980), he moreover maintains that authority may also be based on affect. Sennett is specifically interested in promoting the virtues of authority in the private and public spheres (1980, p.  16). According to Furedi (2013, p.  404), however, the term ‘illegitimate authority’ is an oxymoron and he claims that an authority may no longer act authoritatively when it ceases to be legitimate. For Furedi, it is more useful to speak of “alternative claims to authority, rather than illegitimate claims” (2013, p. 405). Societies in the Global North find it increasingly difficult to reconcile democratic consent with the principle of authority. However, Furedi argues that “the legitimation of authority through popular consent … provides the only plausible model for modern authority” (2013, p. 406). Other researchers, however, make a conceptual distinction between authority and power. According to Peter Skalnik (1999, p. 163), the tension between authority and power is an essential part of the political sphere and they are principally opposite phenomena. In his view, power is closely related to the state, whereas authority does not rest on power but on voluntary recognition by the people. Authority is not in need of (state) power and is different from legitimate domination in the Weberian sense. It is gained through free public support and consent, whereas power results from the use or threat of physical force. Skalnik argues that whenever people act with authority, the quality of collective arrangements is better, and decisions are more durable (Skalnik 1999, p. 164). However, in everyday politics both authority and power play a role and a continuous tension exists between the two principles. Predominance of the one means inferiority of the other and human societies have always struggled for a balance between authority and power. Skalnik is specifically interested in how authority may outwit and tame power, so that the latter becomes less predatory. One example Skalnik mentions is the late South African President Nelson Mandela: outstanding personalities like him “give authority to institutions and roles rather than the other way around” (Skalnik 1999, p. 173). Patrick Chabal (2009) points to the importance of authority in African politics and subsumes it under the crucial aspect of ‘locality’. In his view too, power and authority are distinct phenomena. His definition of power is Weberian: the capacity to force others to obey commands. In contrast, authority is based on persuasion rather than coercion. “One can exercise power without authority but one cannot have authority without being

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

223

acknowledged by others to be worthy of it” (Chabal 2009, p.  40). Authority and power often overlap but they are not equivalent. Indirect rule in Africa produced a political system in which power and authority were clearly separated: precolonial, legitimized chiefs did not necessarily lose authority but authority without colonial recognition resulted in powerlessness. On the other hand, chiefs who were installed by the colonial administration were often powerful but could not act authoritatively (Chabal 2009, pp. 40–42). The more chiefs were forced to act as colonial auxiliaries, the more they lost legitimacy. One of the outcomes of this was a purely instrumentalist form of clientelism which was detached from moral concerns (Chabal 2009, pp.  93–96). In the postcolonial era, the new political elite forced chiefs to be even more obedient and withdrew the necessary resources from them to establish clientelist relations. According to Chabal, this, however, had the advantage that chiefs could regain moral authority and could confront the political elite from a different angle. The postcolonial state was forced to come to terms with the legitimacy of chieftaincy and chiefs in Africa probably have more clout today than they had ten years after independence (Chabal 2009, p. 96). The third perspective perceives authority as a specific form of power and thus contradicts the arguments by Skalnik and Chabal. According to the late German sociologist Heinrich Popitz (1992), authority or ‘authoritative power’ is based on the basic human need for social recognition (Anerkennungsbedürftigkeit). Whereas Arendt identifies a modern loss of authority, Popitz argues that authority is a ubiquitous phenomenon and neither modernity nor rationality can dispose of it. Authority is a relational phenomenon, meaning that someone receives authority from those who acknowledge her or him as superior; it is not a personal capacity in his view. For Popitz, authority is neither inherently good nor bad and is not necessarily founded on force, but an authority may nevertheless use threats or sanctions, if necessary. In contrast to instrumental power, authoritative power affects not only the behaviour but also the attitudes of those who want to be recognized by an authoritative person. This is the key to understanding authority: all human beings are in need of social recognition. “We want to be particularly recognized by those we particularly recognize”1 (Popitz 2017, p. 80). Authoritative power thus comes into being if the basic human need for social recognition is used to influence the behaviour 1  “Wir wollen von denen, die wir besonders anerkennen, besonders anerkannt werden” (Popitz 1992, p. 115).

224 

M. KRÄMER

as well as the (mental) attitudes of another person.2 Hence, authority is not necessarily based on free will, but it is a form of power which may be exercised in different ways, with different intentions, and may evoke diverse responses: it may, for example, result in blind obedience on the one hand or voluntary subordination on the other.3 For Sofsky and Paris (1994, p. 24), any authoritative relationship is also first and foremost based on social recognition: a person becomes an authority if others voluntarily recognize him or her as such. The exercise of power by the authority is generally perceived as legitimate, but not all forms of legitimate domination are authoritative relationships. The authors moreover point to some other crucial characteristics of authoritative power: reciprocity, the values an authority represents, the personal character of the relationship, and the capacity to establish social order. Authority is based on a reciprocal relationship: if I recognize someone else as an authority, I expect to be recognized myself. Although the ascription of authority is one-sided and the relationship is asymmetrical, the expectation of reciprocity gives meaning to one’s subordination to an authority and relieves the subordinates of any disturbing ideas that they are giving up their freedom. Subordination thus places demands on the authority which must not be ignored in the long run. Furthermore, Sofsky and Paris (1994) argue that an authoritative relationship is based on the recognition of the values an authority represents. An authority embodies the values which a subordinate respects and which he/she strives for. The recognition of the values of the authority as his/her own makes the subordinate vulnerable to the judgement of the authority and enables the latter to exert authoritative power. Another key aspect of authoritative relationships is the ascription of authority to a specific person; the personal character of this relationship is based on respect for that individual’s qualities and capabilities (Sofsky and Paris 1994, p. 28). This respect may manifest itself as spontaneous admiration of the abilities and self-confidence of the authority or of the extraordinariness of a charismatic leader, as envisioned by Max Weber. Sofsky and 2  Therefore, authoritative power is structurally similar to instrumental power which, as the most conventional form of power, ‘merely’ affects the behaviour of men by threats and/or promises. 3  “Autoritätswirkungen können zu Beziehungen und Handlungen ganz gegensätzlicher Art führen, zu blindem, blindwütigem Gehorsam oder zu liebend-hellsichtiger Unterordnung, zu fanatischer Selbstaufgabe oder zu selbstbewußter Geborgenheit” (Popitz 1992, pp. 106–107).

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

225

Paris (1994, p. 28) agree that institutions also have authority. However, without the personal authority of individual leaders, institutions disintegrate into a ‘no-man’s rule’ of abstract rules and bureaucratic constraints. They conclude that the more institutions are perceived as anonymous, the less authority is ascribed to them. Finally, Sofsky and Paris (1994, p. 38) point to the aspect of social order. Authority creates order through subordination and the need for authority becomes of utmost importance where disorder prevails. The authority guarantees order by settling conflicts and by pacifying its own group, which also includes the potential to impose sanctions. Although an authority generally regulates power by giving and taking social recognition, it may nevertheless fall back on threats, promises, sanctions or other rougher means of exerting power if necessary.

3   Challenging Neotraditional Authority: A Case Study of the Topnaar Traditional Authority, Namibia4 The Topnaar Traditional Authority is situated in the Erongo region of Namibia. Some of its current characteristics and problems are the lack of control over land, a relatively low population of less than 1000 people, which contributes to the Topnaar’s socioeconomic marginalization by the Namibian state, and unremitting internal strife since at least the 1990s. About half of the Topnaar population lives along the Kuiseb River in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, while several hundred others reside in urban Walvis Bay. However, mobility between the rural and the urban is frequent, and the social boundaries are fluid. The founding of the National Park at the beginning of the twentieth century by the German colonial administration meant the complete loss of Topnaar land rights and even today the Traditional Authority lacks control of the rural land on which the Topnaar live; they merely have permission by the Namibian state to settle along the Kuiseb River. The lack of land rights is certainly part of the reason why the Topnaar are marginalized in the Namibian economy and often live in precarious socioeconomic circumstances. Rural Topnaar in the Kuiseb area regard livestock farming (goats, sheep, cattle) as the most important economic activity (Werner 2003, pp.  21–23). However, animal farming is often 4  For a more detailed ethnographic depiction of the problem of neotraditional authority in the Topnaar community, see Krämer (2020).

226 

M. KRÄMER

insufficient for survival and most households depend on income from casual jobs and especially pensions. The livelihoods of rural Topnaar are thus linked to the urban economy; conversely, the few Topnaar who are relatively wealthy and belong to the urban middle class (such as the kaptein)5 generally invest in livestock farming at the Kuiseb (Werner 2003, p. 21). However, the latter are rather an exception: of those Topnaar living in Walvis Bay and with whom I spent most of my time during fieldwork, only a handful were permanently employed, and most were on the lookout for casual jobs. The low educational levels among the Topnaar aggravate the general socioeconomic crisis. And this crisis is not a new phenomenon: the apparently destitute living conditions of the Topnaar turn up over and over again in official reports since the late nineteenth century. For example, missionary reports of the early twentieth century sketch a desperate picture of the socioeconomic wellbeing of the Topnaar; Winifred Hoernlé (1925, p. 12) even argued that they were “probably the most miserable of all the remnants of the Nama”. From the beginning of nineteenth century, dramatic changes affected the southern part of Namibia when Orlam groups immigrated from the Cape region and started to clash with indigenous Nama communities; the Topnaar were part of the latter. Orlam groups benefitted from the access to firearms in violent conflict with the resident Nama, and in the mid-­ nineteenth century, the Topnaar were caught in a clientelist dependence on Orlam groups. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the Topnaar had to endure colonial subjugation. In 1878, Topnaar leader Piet Haibeb signed a treaty with the British Empire, transferring Walvis Bay and the lower Kuiseb region into British control. He also sold the remaining Topnaar land along the Kuiseb to German merchant Adolf Lüderitz for 20 British pounds (Widlok 1998, p.  122). According to Hoernlé (1925, p. 15) who travelled to the Kuiseb in 1912–1913 and 1922–1923, Topnaar leaders such as Haibeb were not rulers but primus inter pares (see also Budack 1972, p.  205). They were heads of the senior lineage and “accorded a great deal of respect”, but they had to cooperate with the male heads of the other lineages (Hoernlé 1925, p. 15). The conduct of politics was, therefore, the prerogative of older men. Hoernlé highlights that the loyalty to a lineage was strong and factionalism within Nama ‘tribes’ frequent. The limited power of Nama leaders was also evident

5

 Kaptein is the Afrikaans word for ‘chief’.

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

227

from their inability to sanction lineages involved in acts of revenge, or to force them to accept compensation (Hoernlé 1925, p. 16). The overall situation of the Topnaar and other Nama communities deteriorated in the second half of the twentieth century. The Odendaal Plan of 1964 was implemented in the course of apartheid policies in Namibia, when it was held by South Africa as a United Nations mandate. It dealt another blow to Topnaar political autonomy: so-called homelands were established by the apartheid administration and a resettlement plan of the early 1970s aimed at removing all Topnaar from the Kuiseb to farms in the Gibeon area. The German colonial administration had already proclaimed a nature reserve along the Kuiseb in 1907; the apartheid administration enlarged the reserve and eventually established the Namib-Naukluft Park in 1979 (Widlok 1998, pp. 116–119). The implementation of the Odendaal Plan affected the Topnaar in another way: Esau Kooitjie became the first officially recognized ‘headman’, that is, for the first time in Topnaar history (at least as far as we know), power was institutionalized. Before that, local ‘big men’ exercised power sporadically and their positions remained precarious. That is, ‘domination’ in the Weberian (1980) meaning of institutionalized power is a relatively recent development, and the imposition of institutionalized leadership remains one source of criticism of the Topnaar leadership. The collaboration of Esau Kooitjie with the apartheid administration turned out to be complex: Pace Mamdani’s argument of “decentralized despotism” (1996), Kooitjie’s actions illustrate the ambiguity of neotraditional leadership in Africa. He was a gatekeeper and not a rural despot; he did not signify “power that is total and absolute, unchecked and unrestrained” and he could not rule with a “clenched fist” (Mamdani 1996, p. 54). On the one hand, the headman became part and parcel of “administrative chieftaincy” (Krämer 2009; Trotha 1996), but on the other hand, he also defended local interests, led the resistance to Topnaar displacement from the Kuiseb and could enhance his local acceptance. Eventually, Esau Kooitjie succeeded in leading the resistance: the resettlement attempt was discarded, and the Topnaar have continued to live in the Kuiseb area until the present (Kößler 2006, pp. 94–96).

228 

M. KRÄMER

3.1  Quotas, Concessions, and Conflicts Seth Madawa Kooitjie6 took over his father’s office in the early 1980s and, after Namibian Independence in 1990, he was officially recognized by the Namibian government as ‘traditional leader’ of the Topnaar Traditional Authority. In public speeches, the kaptein often referred to his father’s protective role, in part to legitimize his succession as neotraditional leader of the Topnaar: When the 4x4s of the government drove up to the ≠Aoni [Topnaar] at Ossewater and people were told that they must leave this place to go to the south, who was it who stood up for the ≠Aoni and said ‘No, we are not going?’ It was this Ouman Esau. Ouman Esau did not leave this place, even when the Nature Conservation people came and burnt down his house at Ossewater […] The same people who had burnt down the house then came to say that they will tear down the school and that they will build a new school at Gibeon in order to force the ≠Aoni to move. But Ouman Esau Kooitjie replied: ‘I will only go on these knees when they are white’, that is when he is dead. (quoted from Widlok 1998, p. 119)

Besides being a recognized neotraditional leader, the kaptein was an entrepreneur—or, as one of my key informants put it more bluntly, ‘The chief is always where the money is’.7 The kaptein was a board member and shareholder of a fishing company that was founded after a fishing concession had been allocated to the Topnaar in the mid-1990s due to their status as a ‘traditional community’. About ten years later, the Namibian state assigned a tourism concession to the Topnaar, and the kaptein established a tourism company with four fellow Topnaar in 2007. Both the fishing and tourism concessions were officially intended to contribute to the social and economic development of the Topnaar community as a whole, but the reality was different. Since at least the mid-1990s, the Topnaar Traditional Authority has been affected by recurrent internal strife sparked by the fishing and tourism concessions. The new economic resources and opportunities have had a severe impact on the legitimacy of the kaptein and his Traditional Council: both in private conversations and in public meetings, they were accused of plundering the collective resources without redistributing the revenues to the community. 6 7

 Kaptein Seth Madawa Kooitjie died in January 2019.  Personal field notes (#359; 24 September 2007).

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

229

Furthermore, the criticism was often made that important decisions (such as the founding of the fishing and tourism companies) were taken within a small circle of followers of the kaptein, and the majority only became aware of the problematic overlapping of private and collective interests from local newspapers, radio or gossip on the streets. Hence, criticism of the neotraditional leadership can be found in reports and articles on the Topnaar Traditional Authority since the mid-1990s and formed a major thread in everyday talk and interviews during my fieldwork. In short, the issue concerning fishing quota regulations began when a Topnaar employed with the national state administration was able to obtain a quota in about 1994 due to the recognized ‘traditional’ status of the Topnaar. He founded a private fishing company together with the kaptein and some other non-Topnaar shareholders, on the basis that 10% of the total dividends should be paid to a Topnaar foundation.8 Almost from the beginning, severe conflicts flared up between the kaptein and his close circle of followers on the one hand, and their local critics on the other: it was debated whether a 10% share for the community at large was sufficient in principle and whether the actual dividends were managed in a transparent way by the foundation (which was chaired by the kaptein). The conflicts surrounding the tourism concession had a similar background and trajectory: the national Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) granted a concession to a Topnaar community trust for 4×4 tours in the Namib desert south of Walvis Bay, which seemed to be a very lucrative economic opportunity. During my fieldwork, a struggle over the ownership of the concession got into full swing: the main contenders were the kaptein and his long-time opponent. Both had once worked closely together in the leadership of the Topnaar Traditional Authority, but their relationship had deteriorated over the course of the fishing quota saga and the opponent was dismissed as a Traditional Councillor by the kaptein. With the new tourism concession, both demanded to be in control of it, and both co-operated with different commercial tour operators and tried to get the MET and fellow Topnaar on their side. The MET attempted to resolve the conflicts, but only half-heartedly, and with greater support for the neotraditional leadership. By contrast, many local Topnaar mistrusted

8  For example, dividends of about N$438,000 (about €37,000) were paid to the Topnaar Community Foundation, which held 10% of Aonin Fishing holdings, in March 2013 (see The Namibian 2013).

230 

M. KRÄMER

both the kaptein and his rival with varying and fluctuating degrees of intensity. In general, these conflicts resonate with Hoernlé’s (1925) observations on factionalism in Nama political orders in the past, but the divisions in the Topnaar case were not as clear-cut in terms of kinship as those described by Hoernlé. Apart from small, loyal circles of close friends and relatives on each side, support for either of the two local ‘big men’ was fluid and opportunistic—that is, it depended very much on specific circumstances and economic opportunities. Even so, the factional divide was not only triggered by the democratic transition and newly emerging economic opportunities but could also be interpreted as a more enduring feature of Nama political organization (see Klocke-Daffa 2001; Kößler 2006 on internal conflict in Nama communities in southern Namibia). The conflicts over the quota and concession also illustrate that the kaptein was forced constantly to reaffirm his authority and power. Since tradition was not sufficient to emphasize his claim to power due to the very recent establishment of neotraditional leadership among the Topnaar, he positioned himself as an intermediary figure between the state and the local. That is, he tried to play the state off against local citizens and vice versa—a never-ending balancing act which the kaptein, however, accomplished successfully until his death. For example, ordinary Topnaar frequently called the kaptein the ‘chief on the road’ in talks and interviews: he travelled a lot between Walvis Bay and the capital, Windhoek, where he met state representatives, fellow neotraditional leaders and other key figures in Namibian politics. The fundamental point of criticism was that the kaptein was more concerned with preserving good relations with state officials than caring for the needs and problems of his subordinates. The kaptein was aware of the widespread discontent and accusations but claimed that the state provided far too few resources (financial and administrative) for him to be able to fulfil his obligations as a neotraditional leader in a proper manner. Finally, the debates and conflicts surrounding the fishing quota and tourism concession resonate with an observation made by Comaroff and Comaroff (2009), who argue that the commodification of culture and tradition often empowers neotraditional leaders in relation to their subjects (and also in relation to the state) but at the same time generates grievances and bitter conflict over the distribution of revenues. The corporatization of tradition by means of quotas and concessions is thus a double-­ edged sword: on the one hand, it ties neotraditional leaders to the state

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

231

and enables them to benefit not only in financial terms but also by expanding and stabilizing their local power towards their subordinates; but, on the other, it also provokes resistance to and delegitimization of neotraditional leadership. However, the distinction between office and incumbent is important, and the Topnaar youth uprising illustrates that rather than eradicating neotraditional authority per se, the main objective of the rebellious youth was to criticize and modify existing power relations. 3.2  The Topnaar ‘Youth Uprising’ In my interpretation, the youth uprising was a consequence of the conflicts surrounding the fishing quota and tourism concession: the criticism and political mobilization were aimed at the ways in which the neotraditional leadership approached questions of resource distribution, democratic participation and local power relations more generally. What did community activists understand by their quest (or activism) for democracy? What were their objectives, what did they argue, and how did they act? What is described here as a youth uprising was not the first challenge to the Topnaar neotraditional leadership since the early 1990s. The kaptein’s main rival and former Traditional Councillor (see earlier in the text) continuously sought to outdo the neotraditional leader with respect to local influence, authority, and power. In doing so, he followed a different strategy from the kaptein: he saw himself as a ‘community activist’ and was quite successful in making national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) aware of the difficult socioeconomic situation of the Topnaar. He initiated, for example, a !nara harvesting project and training programme for local tour guides.9 He moreover built up translocal relationships with global indigenous movements and presented himself as the spokesperson of the Topnaar at international workshops. Another contender who tried to oust the kaptein before and during my fieldwork primarily questioned the neotraditional leader’s traditional legitimacy and argued that he was the legitimate heir of one of the Topnaar leaders of the late nineteenth century (see The Namibian 2007). In contrast to these previous attempts to replace the kaptein, the three young men who 9  In popularized reports, the!nara-fruit is often essentialized as the key symbol of the Topnaar economy and identity. On the economic and social importance of the!nara, see Henschel, Dausab, Moser and Pallett (Henschel et al. 2004).

232 

M. KRÄMER

initiated the youth uprising were considerably younger (in their mid-30s) and they articulated their critique mainly in terms of democratic ideas and practices. Before I started my fieldwork in March 2007, I had already been aware of the local conflicts and the divisions between the kaptein and his main rival through the reading of newspaper articles and reports. My intention was nevertheless to find a more or less autonomous stance, to get access to a variety of opposing actors and to understand their different perspectives. But almost from the start, it became clear to me that the kaptein had far less interest in my research than those in opposition to him. To make matters worse (at least as I perceived it at the time), the collaboration with my two research assistants (a nephew of the kaptein on the one hand, and a relative of the main rival on the other) turned out to be extremely different, in that my personal and working relationship with the latter was very productive and inspiring. Apart from the overall topic of my research itself, personal and pragmatic factors thus contributed to my positioning in the field. For my research assistant and friend, our collaboration also had the positive financial side effect that he was not forced to look for casual jobs for the time of my fieldwork—and he could thus focus on what he referred to as ‘community matters’. We had endless discussions (often together with my research assistant’s two closest friends) about the problems and conflicts confronting the Topnaar Traditional Authority, and my interlocutors were inspired by the public and academic debate on the struggle over neotraditional authority in Southern Africa. The general questions we discussed were whether neotraditional authority could be in alignment with democracy and how democratic control of neotraditional leaders could be achieved. The three young men were fully aware of their democratic rights, but they also attributed a specific meaning to neotraditional authority as an institution, at least with regard to the Topnaar case: ideally, neotraditional authority could establish and preserve a specific form of cultural identity and thus also serve as a kind of protective measure for the Topnaar community that was otherwise marginalized in relation to the Namibian state. In August 2007, my research assistant and I conducted a questionnaire to get a better understanding of who identified themselves as belonging to the Topnaar Traditional Authority and, conversely, for whom a Topnaar

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

233

identity was insignificant.10 My uneasy relationship with the kaptein deteriorated afterwards, obviously because he and his allies feared that too much attention to and awareness-raising about local problems and conflicts could intensify the persistent critique and the delegitimization of the neotraditional leaders. In early September, the kaptein, his nephew and the senior councillor stopped me on the road and told me to end the questionnaire, to follow the ‘rules and regulations’ of the Traditional Authority, and to inform the kaptein about any statements during my research that might cast an unfavourable light on the Traditional Authority.11 When I told my research assistant about this strange encounter, he joked about what these rules and regulations could be and told me that the kaptein had allegedly threatened “to chase you out of the Kuiseb and even out of Namibia” in front of other Topnaar the day before.12 My research assistant and his two closest friends were also upset about my encounter with the neotraditional leaders, and when I asked them what to do in this difficult situation, they urged me to continue with my research and fieldwork. They moreover decided to organize a community meeting in October, which then triggered a series of additional meetings in the weeks that followed. The young men and I talked about my role in their quest for democracy, and I decided to contribute materially and logistically (I paid the rent for the venue and gave transport to participants) but otherwise did not contribute to the discussions and attended the public meetings as an observer. Nevertheless, the questionnaire and the reaction to it by the neotraditional leadership was one point of discussion at the first community meeting. The 25 participants raised several other issues that they perceived as pressing problems: that there was ‘no development’ but widespread favouritism and corruption; that decisions were taken without the involvement of the community and also not communicated by the leadership; and that the neotraditional leaders acted irresponsibly and did not care about the community’s concerns. One of the participants, for example, claimed vehemently: “We want a leadership [that] is available 24/7, not a leadership [that] is not there for the community!” The three 10  A Topnaar identity is often associated with belonging to the Topnaar Traditional Authority by those defining themselves as Topnaar. What is also often mentioned is an attachment to the Kuiseb area, which is perceived as the Topnaar place of origin. 11  Personal field notes (#331; 11 September 2007). 12  Personal field notes (#338; 14 September 2007).

234 

M. KRÄMER

young men, in turn, made the participants aware of their democratic rights. They argued that all Topnaar had the right (and also the need) to rise up and question the leadership: “We must stand up and say ‘enough is enough’!” One of them claimed that the leadership usually referred to customary law in order to play down any criticism—“but remember our customary law is not higher than the government law”. The young men also declared that the community had the right to be involved in decision-­ making and that only the community itself could solve the existing problems. In sum, they tried to convince the participants that there was a need for change—and that ‘the youth’ had a larger role to play: “When will the leaders realize that the young generation are the leaders of tomorrow? When will we get the opportunity to get involved in the leadership?” The day after, the three young men and I met to reflect on the meeting and its consequences. I felt that I was part of their political mobilization, but at the same time I was wary of being dragged more and more into local conflicts. The request by the kaptein that I provide information about his critics had shown me that my independent stance was seriously being called into question or had even already become an illusion. Two alternatives seemed possible to me: either to stop my fieldwork or to continue to observe the resistance to the neotraditional leadership and to retain at least a minimum of analytical distance from it. Since I thought that the three had a respectable cause (that was moreover in alignment with democratic principles), and since I enjoyed their companionship in a private and professional sense, I decided to continue with my field research. For their part, the three young men perceived me as an ally in their political mobilization and argued that the ‘democratic development’ of the Topnaar community was their main objective.13 The first meeting conducted by the three young men was a provocation that the neotraditional leadership could not ignore. The leaders obviously became nervous and were forced to call a general community meeting at short notice via radio. On the day of that meeting, I arrived early at the home of my research assistant, and when most of his friends had arrived over the course of the morning, I drove them in my minibus to the Traditional Office in Utuseb at the Kuiseb River. About 50 Topnaar participated in the meeting, most of them between 30 and 50 years old, and slightly more of them men than women (Figs.  1 and 2). The meeting continued for about seven hours without a formal break; when  Personal field notes (#413; 15 October 2007).

13

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

235

Fig. 1  Utuseb (Namibia), showing Topnaar monument and traditional office. (Photo by the author)

participants got tired, bored, or hungry, they left the meeting for a while and returned later. Neither food nor drinks were offered by the leadership, about which several participants complained. I took a seat in the back row, took photos occasionally, listened to the discussions, and observed the participants. Sometimes I left the room and joined the participants outside to talk about what had been discussed so far. The meeting began with the obligatory prayer. After this formal beginning, the atmosphere became very intense, with stern criticism of the neotraditional leadership being voiced openly and passionately by male and female, young and old Topnaar alike. Only a few relatives and immediate followers spoke in defence of the neotraditional leaders. The meeting was democratic in the sense that all could participate in the debate. Nevertheless, one of the three young men complained later that the kaptein had more opportunities to speak than other community members. Moreover, the agenda had been set by the kaptein and his senior councillor in advance and was geared to their interests. For example, the most disputed topics, such as the tourism concession, were only raised in the late afternoon. As

236 

M. KRÄMER

Fig. 2  Topnaar community meeting in Utuseb (Namibia), October 2007. (Photo by the author)

in the interviews I had conducted with the kaptein before, he often referred to the national Traditional Authorities Act of 2000 and held up a copy of it in his hand, along with other legal documents, when he tried to convince the participants of his arguments. Yet, although the kaptein was at the centre of the debate and the senior councillor moderated the discussion, they had to defend themselves and their activities most of the time. ‘Respect’ was often referred to by the neotraditional leadership and the senior councillor reprimanded participants when he felt that somebody had ‘lost respect’.14 However, these admonishments did not prevent several community members from criticizing the kaptein in a harsh and sometimes very personal manner. At the same time, despite these noisy

14  See also Hoernlé’s (1925, p. 15) remarks on the importance of showing respect for a Nama leader.

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

237

arguments, the participants also laughed together here and there, and sometimes the meeting seemed almost playful. The topics discussed were similar to those in the first meeting: the neotraditional leadership was openly accused of corruption, favouritism, and a lack of transparency, accountability, and responsibility for community matters. One middle-aged man also criticized the plans of the neotraditional leadership to build a Topnaar cultural centre. When I spoke to him outside the traditional office, he wondered what sense such a centre would make when the neotraditional leadership “does not care about culture and tradition at all?!” The kaptein defended himself by saying that it was the right of the neotraditional leadership to take decisions on behalf of the community and that “without the community, we [neotraditional leaders] are dead”. Besides the three young men, a relatively wealthy, elderly woman (who owned considerably more livestock than the average) was the most outspoken critic of the neotraditional leaders. She obviously sympathized with the young men’s cause and one of her interventions summarizes many of the grievances that were raised: [T]hese leaders don’t care about the community because these leaders will decide on their own and do [things] on their own […] Why you actually even hold this meeting [is because] you heard that there [were] meetings held in Walvis Bay, that is why you decided to have a meeting. Because of these reasons I’m thinking of taking you off as leaders, you as chief and the councillors! So that we put [some new] leaders, who can look after us and lead us [on] the right path and not in a corrupt way. We don’t know what the leaders decide, but they say it’s always for the community. This stuff you are referring [to] as the community’s stuff, is not ours but it’s yours.15

The kaptein was visibly uneasy after this statement and asked whether this was the general opinion. When nobody replied to his question, the elderly woman stood up again and asked vehemently: “Why are you all quiet now?” After this brief moment of perplexity, the intense and controversial discussion flared up again and the meeting only ended when it became dark (the Traditional Office had no electricity); all of a sudden, a last prayer was said and the participants started to leave. On the way to my car, one of the three young men was very upset and shouted: “So you see, there’s no democracy here […] this is like Zimbabwe! No decisions were  Participant observation in Topnaar community meeting (20 October 2007).

15

238 

M. KRÄMER

taken by the participants, they were taken before!” There was a passionate atmosphere in my overcrowded minibus on our way back; the participants shouted back and forth as they recalled what had been said (and left out) by the neotraditional leadership and one of the three young men met with general approval when he recapitulated: “This meeting showed us that we must continue with our struggle!” A few months later, however, the youth uprising fizzled out. One of the three young men went over to the kaptein’s side and became his advisor, whereas the other two were disillusioned and lost interest in local politics after a while.

4   Discussion and Concluding Remarks What are the main findings of this case study in the light of the three theoretical perspectives and the general interest of this edited volume in ‘challenging authorities’? First and pace Arendt (1956), (neotraditional) authority has not disappeared in the ‘modern world’—on the contrary, the extensive literature on chieftaincy in contemporary Africa illustrates the (renewed) significance of neotraditional authority (see among others Baldwin 2016; Berry 2017; Comaroff and Comaroff 2018; Williams 2010; Zenker and Hoehne 2018). Authority is a ubiquitous phenomenon, in Popitz’ (1992) words, even in a context (such as the Topnaar’s) in which the power and legitimacy of neotraditional leaders are seriously called into question. Second and pace Skalnik (1999), the case study shows that power is not only a feature of the state but also of neotraditional leadership. Following Popitz (1992) and Sofsky and Paris (1994), my argument is that there is no authority without power. In other words, authority is a specific form of power and we should beware of neither romanticizing nor condemning (neotraditional) authority. Third and pace Myers (2008), the case study of the Topnaar ‘youth uprising’ exemplifies that the legitimacy of a political institution does not necessarily depend on ‘active authorization’, that is, the deliberate passing of power between different actors in a hierarchical relationship. It also calls Furedi’s (2013) argument into question that popular consent is the only plausible model for the legitimation of authority. Although neotraditional authority has not been actively authorized by its subjects (by means of elections or majority decisions), a general acceptance of the institution can nevertheless be ascertained within the Topnaar community. This means that an institution is perceived as legitimate, even

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

239

if there is no “consensual transfer of power from one actor to another”, in Myers’ (2008) words. This leads us, finally, to the thorny question of the relationship between neotraditional authority and democracy. In general, democratic decision-­ making rests on one of two principles: majority decision or consensus. The two community meetings discussed here, and others I observed during my fieldwork in the Topnaar Traditional Authority, could be described, however, as ‘deliberation without decision-making’. The manifold local problems and conflicts were discussed openly and almost endlessly, but no explicit decisions were taken in the end—despite the fact that numerous Topnaar complained passionately about the ways in which the neotraditional leadership usually took decisions (‘behind closed doors’, ‘without informing the community’) and called these ‘autocratic’. One could argue that the participants of community meetings at least reached a consensus in the sense that dissent faded away over the course of the ceaseless debate. However, an explicit consensus was usually not identifiable and what eventually followed from the debate remained vague. Majority decisions were also completely lacking in the meetings I observed. Voting (either secret or open) on specific issues such as the ownership of and responsibility for the tourism concession was never demanded by the participants or my interviewees: they simply did not perceive this as a desirable and/or realistic option. Nevertheless, numerous Topnaar repeatedly and vehemently complained about the course and outcome of community meetings afterwards, as I outlined earlier. The paradox is, then, that although the meetings were an example of democratic deliberation and were conducted according to formally democratic principles (free speech, relative equality in terms of gender and age), the relevant substantive decisions (on the fishing quota and tourism concession) were not democratically legitimized—neither as a majority decision nor as explicit consensus—but rather they were taken without democratic control by a small circle of actors behind closed doors. Nevertheless, the community meetings were perceived as an important event by ordinary Topnaar (young and old, men and women) and represented a rare opportunity for them to confront the neotraditional leaders face to face, to hold up a mirror to them, and to reproach them for failing to serve a common good. First and foremost, community meetings gave Topnaar subjects the chance to scrutinize and assess the authority of neotraditional leaders. Hence, the community meetings were also performative in the important sense that the participants expressed the dividing

240 

M. KRÄMER

lines and the distribution of power within the Topnaar Traditional Authority and thus publicly (re)staged the debate on the legitimacy of neotraditional authority at large.

References Arendt, Hannah (1970). On Violence. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Arendt, Hannah (1956). Was ist Autorität? In: Der Monat, 89, pp. 29–44. Baldwin, Kate (2016). The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berry, Sara (2017). Struggles Over Land and Authority in Africa. In: African Studies Review, 60 (3), pp. 105–125. Budack, Kuno Franz R. (1972). Die traditionelle politische Struktur der Khoe-­ Khoen in Südwestafrika. Stamm und Stammesregierung, auf historischer Grundlage. PhD thesis, University of Pretoria. Chabal, Patrick (2009). Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling. London: Zed Books. Claassens, Annika (2014). Denying Ownership and Equal Citizenship: Continuities in the State’s Use of Law and ‘Custom’, 1913-2013. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 40 (4): pp. 761–779. Comaroff, John L. / Comaroff, Jean (Eds.) (2018). The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, John L. / Comaroff, Jean (2009). Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Furedi, Frank (2013). Authority: A Sociological History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henschel, Joh / Dausab, Rudolf / Moser, Petra / Pallett, John (Eds.) (2004). !Nara: Fruit for Development of the !Khuiseb Topnaar. Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society. Hoernlé, Winifred (1925). The Social Organization of the Nama Hottentots of Southwest Africa. In: American Anthropologist, 27 (1), pp. 1–24. Klocke-Daffa, Sabine (2001). ‘Wenn du hast, musst du geben’: Soziale Sicherung im Ritus und im Alltag bei den Nama von Berseba/Namibia. Münster: Lit Verlag. Kößler, Reinhart (2006). In Search of Survival and Dignity: Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia Under South African Rule. Frankfurt a.M.: IKO. Krämer, Mario (2020). Neotraditional Authority Contested: The Corporatization of Tradition and the Quest for Democracy in the Topnaar Traditional Authority, Namibia. In: Africa, 90 (2), pp. 318–338.

  CHALLENGING NEOTRADITIONAL AUTHORITY 

241

Krämer, Mario (2016). Neither Despotic nor Civil: The Legitimacy of Chieftaincy in its Relationship with the ANC and the State in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa). In: Journal of Modern African Studies, 54 (1), pp. 117–143. Krämer, Mario (2009). Vom administrativen zum konkurrenziellen Häuptlingtum: Anmerkungen zur Legitimität und Transformation neotraditionaler Herrschaft in Namibia und KwaZulu-Natal, Südafrika. In: Sociologus, 59 (2), pp. 173–198. LiPuma, Edward / Koelble, Thomas A. (2009). Deliberative Democracy and the Politics of Traditional Leadership in South Africa: A Case of Despotic Domination or Democratic Deliberation? In: Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 27 (2), pp. 201-223. Mamdani, Mahmood (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Myers, Jason C. (2008). Indirect Rule in South Africa: Tradition, Modernity, and the Costuming of Political Power. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Ntsebeza, Lungisile (2005). Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of the Land in South Africa. Leiden: Brill. Oomen, Barbara (2005). Chiefs in South Africa: Law, Power and Culture in the Post-Apartheid Era. Oxford: James Currey. Popitz, Heinrich (2017). Phenomena of Power. Authority, Domination, and Violence. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Popitz, Heinrich (1992). Phänomene der Macht. Tübingen: Mohr. Sennett, Richard (1980). Autorität. Berlin: Berlin Verlag. Skalnik, Peter (1999). Authority versus Power: A View from Social Anthropology. In: Cheater, Angela (Ed.), The Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures. London: Routledge, pp. 163–174. Sofsky, Wolfgang / Paris, Rainer (1994). Figurationen sozialer Macht: Autorität, Stellvertretung, Koalition. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Spear, Thomas (2003). Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa. In: Journal of African History, 44 (1), pp. 3–27. The Namibian (2013). Small Communities Enjoy Dividends from Fisheries Shares. The Namibian, 8 March 2013. Retrieved from http://www.namibian.com. na/106042/archive-­read/Small-­communities-­enjoy-­dividends-­from-­fisheries, accessed 23 September 2017. The Namibian (2007). Topnaars Still at Odds Over Chief. The Namibian, 19 December 2007. Retrieved from http://www.namibian.com.na/31243/ archive-­read/Topnaars-­still-­at-­odds-­over-­chief-­MEMBERS-­of-­the, accessed 24 September 2017. Trotha, Trutz von (1996). From Administrative to Civil Chieftaincy: Some Problems and Prospects of African Chieftaincy. In: Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 28 (37/38), pp. 79–107. Weber, Max (1980). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. (First published in 1921) Tübingen: Mohr.

242 

M. KRÄMER

Werner, Wolfgang (2003). Livelihoods Among the Topnaar of the Lower Kuiseb. Unpublished report: Environmental Learning and Action in the Kuiseb (ELAK) Programme. Widlok, Thomas (1998). Unearthing Culture: Khoisan Funerals and Social Change. In: Anthropos, 93, pp. 115–126. Williams, J. Michael (2010). Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Zenker, Olaf / Hoehne, Markus V. (Eds.) (2018). The State and the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa. London: Routledge.

PART III

Power and Authority over Space

Changes in Ethnicity and Land Rights Among the !Xun of North-Central Namibia Akira Takada and Erika Miyake

1   Introduction The San1 are known as (post)hunter-gatherers and as indigenous peoples across Southern Africa. Research results from fields such as anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology, have accumulated over a long period of time, and have revealed the presence of diverse linguistic, areal, and cultural differentiations among the San (e.g. Barnard 1992; Bleek 1924).  The origins of the term ‘San’ can be traced back to the designation given by the Khoekhoe, a neighbouring ethnic group whose livelihood consists mainly of herding livestock. They are also referred to as ‘Bushmen’ (a designation given by Europeans) or ‘Basarwa’ (a designation given by Tswana people, which etymologically means ‘people of the south’ [Brown 1979]). Although all of these terms have problems in terms of reflecting the historical context (Barnard 1992, pp. 16–36), this chapter employs ‘San’ as the preferred term of designation, being the most commonly used in the context of contemporary international politics and research. 1

A. Takada (*) Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan E. Miyake Sojitz Corporation, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_9

245

246 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

Early studies of the San saw their society as key to analysing the archetype of human society. These ‘traditionalist’ studies focused on the San who lived a relatively autonomous nomadic lifestyle, particularly the Ju|’hoan, who lived in what is now northeast Namibia and northwest Botswana (e.g. Lee 1979; Lee and DeVore 1968), and the G|ui and the Gǁana in the central part of Botswana (e.g. Tanaka 1980). On the other hand, ‘revisionist’ studies have insisted that the San were merely groups of people who had been transformed into an underclass within the larger politico-economic system that included their neighbours, and had been forced to lead a foraging-based nomadic life. The revisionists have further criticized the idea of an isolated and autonomous San society as being a mere illusion invented by traditionalists, and have rejected the hypothesis that the alleged archetype of human society can be reconstructed from analysis of primordial San society (e.g. Gordon and Douglas 2000; Wilmsen 1990, 1989). However, the traditionalist focus on the adaptation of San society to the natural arid environment and the revisionist argument portraying the San as people on the periphery of wider regional societies share similar weaknesses in that neither of these arguments fully respect the perspectives of the San themselves and the agency that they exercise in their social life. In addition, given the cultural diversity of San groups, discussing ‘San society’ in a unitary manner by focusing on a specific group is misleading, at best. In view of this, it is necessary to discuss the ways in which San people actively shape their daily lives in response to a variety of circumstances, transcending the debate between the traditionalists and revisionists (e.g. Dieckmann 2007; Takada 2015; Widlok 1999). From the 2000s onwards, studies emphasizing subjectivity and agency among the San began to be conducted not only by scholars, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other organizations but also by the San individuals themselves (Berger and Zimprich-Mazive 2002; Dieckmann et al. 2014; Kiema 2010). Reflecting this new perspective in San studies, this chapter is focused on the !Xun, one of the San groups living in north-central Namibia. The !Xun are sociolinguistically closely related to the Ju|’hoan, who have been the focus of the debate between the traditionalists and revisionists. The San languages are closely related to those spoken by the Khoikhoi, whose subsistence activities consist mainly of pastoralism. Together, the San and Khoikhoi languages are called the Khoisan languages. Following the

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

247

descriptions by Bleek (1929, pp. 1–11), these languages were traditionally divided into northern, central, and southern groups, which have often been understood as three distinct language families. Recently, linguists have proposed a new framework, classifying Khoisan languages into Kx’a, Khoe-Kwadi, and Tuu language families based on recent linguistic findings and relevant discussions (e.g. Güldemann 2014). !Xun and Ju|’hoan languages are classified as belonging to northern and Kx’a language families according to the older and newer classification frameworks, respectively. Due to this common background, in some revisionist studies of the San, the !Xun and Ju|’hoan were not clearly differentiated (e.g. Wilmsen 1989, p.  96, p. 110, p. 117, p. 128), and the !Xun in north-central Namibia have been overlooked, not having become a main research focus in San studies. In recent years, however, the !Xun have been widely recognized as being a different group from the Ju|’hoan in several respects, such as in kinship terminology (e.g. Boden and Takada 2014; Takada 2008) and language (e.g. Heikkinen 1987; König and Heine 2001). Reflecting these recent trends, the !Xun have begun to receive increasing attention as a focus of studies in various academic fields including anthropological, linguistic, and developmental studies (e.g. Hitchcock 2012; PohambaNdume 2016; Stutzriemer 2020; Takada 2015; Vossen 2013). These studies have revealed that the !Xun have continued to exist until today without losing the specific group boundaries that distinguish them from other groups and have maintained their autonomy as a group in northcentral Namibia even as they have historically interacted closely with various neighbouring ethnic groups and organizations (Takada 2015). The multi-­layered self- and other-representations that have arisen through the repeated struggle for recognition (Honneth 1995) of the !Xun’s collective representation form their unique ethnicity. Furthermore, one of the most important reasons why the !Xun have maintained these boundaries is that they have retained the land used for their livelihood despite considerable turmoil in their history (Takada 2015). In this chapter, we examine how the !Xun have historically negotiated their land rights with various authoritative powers, namely, neighbouring ethnic groups and organizations, focusing on the ‘excludability’ and ‘subtractability’ (Ostrom 2005) of land use. According to Ostrom (2005, p. 23), excludability relates to the difficulty in restricting those who benefit from the provision of goods, and subtractability refers to the extent to which one individual’s use subtracts from the availability of goods for consumption by others. Both

248 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

excludability and subtractability can range from low to high.2 By means of this approach, we discuss how !Xun people have actively formed their daily lives in response to rapidly changing circumstances and the characteristic means by which they have interacted with various authoritative powers.

2   Overview of the Research Area The Ohangwena Region is situated in the northern part of Namibia along the border with Angola, approximately 750  km from the capital, Windhoek. It is located at an altitude of about 1155 m. The average rainfall in the area between 1982 and 2012 was 581 mm (Climate-data.org 2020), but the amount varies greatly from year to year. The climate is classified as steppe with dry and wet seasons. The land is densely covered with bushes and spreading shrubs, but the landscape changes depending on the season. The soil is classified as arenosol, which is thought unsuitable for agriculture. Nonetheless, various Bantu-speaking peoples have practised autonomous agriculture, using indigenous methods without irrigation facilities. As their staple food, many farmers in the area grow pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum, called mahangu in the Oshiwambo language3), which is particularly resistant to a dry climate compared to other grain crops. Furthermore, the majority of the local people cope with the unstable natural environment by combining agriculture and livestock farming. They customarily use livestock dung in an attempt to enhance soil fertility. The total population of the Ohangwena region is 245,446, with a population density of 23 people per km2. As this figure greatly exceeds the national population density of 2.6 people per km2, the region is characterized as one of the most densely populated areas in the country (NSA 2011a). Most of the population (98%) are Oshiwambo speakers. Although Oshiwambo speakers account for 49% of the people in Namibia, the number of Ovawambo (a.k.a. Aawambo) in the Ohangwena region is overwhelming compared with other ethnic groups (NSA 2011a). Although 2  For example, a bottle of wine is seen as having high excludability and high subtractability, because the owner can exclude others from drinking it and, once it has been consumed, others cannot drink it. Air is characterized as having low excludability and low subtractability, as it is difficult to restrict someone from breathing air and one’s breathing does not subtract from the enjoyment of others’ breathing. 3  Among the Oshiwambo languages, I basically use the orthography of the Oshikwanyama language, which is the major language in the Ohangwena region.

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

249

few in number, there are households in which languages other than Oshiwambo are in daily use, including the San, Herero, and Nama languages (NSA 2011b). Other residents are immigrants from Angola who are here due to the proximity of the border. The main sources of income for households in the Ohangwena region consist of pensions (29%), agriculture and livestock farming (26%), wage labour (22%), self-­employment (12%), and other (11%). Due to regional development in recent years, people’s livelihoods have become increasingly diversified (NSA 2011b). Fieldwork was conducted in the village of Ekoka in the Okongo Constituency of the Ohangwena Region. Ekoka is situated approximately 25 km southeast of Okongo, the centre of the Okongo Constituency, just under an hour’s drive along a dirt road. According to the headman of Ekoka, there are approximately 275 Ovawambo households in the village, with an average of seven members per household (as of 2017). Hence, the Ovawambo population at Ekoka is estimated at around 1900.4 Two different San groups, the !Xun and the ǂAkhoe,5 also live at Ekoka. According to the census taken by the second author in 2017, there were 37 households headed by either !Xun couples or !Xun–ǂAkhoe couples, and the total population of these households numbered 121 people. When the first author conducted fieldwork in 1998, the population of family households at Ekoka headed by either !Xun couples or !Xun–ǂAkhoe couples comprised 183 people (Takada 2015, p. 13). Thus, the !Xun population is in decline. Furthermore, the population of households headed by ǂAkhoe couples at Ekoka has significantly decreased, from 87 people in 1998 (Takada 2015, p. 13) to 11 people in 2017. The data for the following sections were obtained from fieldwork focused on households headed by !Xun couples or !Xun–ǂAkhoe couples and a literature review.

4  ‘Ovawambo’ is a generic term that refers to multiple groups and sub-groups; the Ovakwanyama, the Aandonga, and the Aakwambi are included in this designation. Of these sub-groups, the Ovakwanyama constitutes the overwhelming majority of the population around Ekoka. 5  The ǂAkhoe language is classified as being in the Khoe-Kwadi family. They are closely related to the Haiǁom, who were the focus of studies by Widlok (1999) and Dieckmann (2007). In this chapter, we focus on analysing social history in relation to the land among the !Xun and leave that of the ǂAkhoe for future studies.

250 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

3   The Development of a Plural Society It is said that the San were indigenous to north-central Namibia and lived a nomadic lifestyle in this area. The Bantu-speaking people, who later gave rise to the Ovawambo, are believed to have moved into this area from the north, sometime in the first millennium A.D. (Williams 1994, p. 32, pp. 51–53, p. 73). After the San and the Ovawambo peoples encountered one another, they maintained habitat segregation for a long time, relying on their own niches in the natural environment. Border agreements were purportedly reached between the San and the Ovawambo regarding hunting grounds and residential areas (Williams 1994, p. 48, pp. 96–97). Near the boundaries, they cooperated. Trading was carried out between the two peoples, chiefly involving furs and beans (Williams 1994, p.  88). The Ovawambo established seasonal grazing lands for cattle in the wilderness, gradually moving their living spaces into the wilderness. The San’s support was essential in this process. The wilderness was beyond the Ovawambo’s control and was seen as a fearful place belonging to the San, who were regarded as having ‘magical skills’ that originated from the wilderness (Kreike 2004, pp. 129–132, p. 168, 1996, p. 325, p. 361, p. 409). The process by which the Ovawambo changed the wilderness into their habitat was, in other words, the process by which they transformed the living area of the San into their own domain. Accordingly, the San gradually lost their mystic power6 over the Ovawambo there. The mutual dependence between the San and the Ovawambo gradually strengthened over time. This process probably occurred with the growing population and the increasing proximity of their residential areas. Consequently, the San and the Ovawambo came to form what Radcliffe-­ Brown (1952, p.  202) and Kuper (1997) have called a ‘plural society’. ‘Once the plural society is constituted, some growth of common institutions, in addition to common governmental institutions, and some association between members of different cultural groups, are inevitable’ (Kuper 1997, pp.  226–227). Accordingly, from around the eighteenth century, the Ovawambo started to establish several kingdoms, and the San were increasingly incorporated into that system. Under these kingdoms, the San not only acted as trading partners but also provided a labour force as professional hunters and bodyguards for kings (Gordon and Douglas 2000, pp.  26–27; Kreike 2004, p. 26, 1996, p. 35; Williams 1994, p. 6

 In this chapter, ‘power’ denotes the ability to produce an effect over others or things.

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

251

118). Moreover, intermarriages were arranged between the Ovawambo’s blood royals and the San. For example, the king of the Uukwambi, one of the Ovawambo kingdoms, was to marry a woman from the San or zebra clan as his first wife. Similar practices are reported in other groups as well. Reflecting the matrilineal clan system that is widespread among the Ovawambo, some of the early kings of Oshiwambo kingdoms were regarded as San. Furthermore, the San allegedly had a strong influence over the kingdoms. Among the Aangandjera, another subgroup of the Ovawambo, marriages with San were reportedly common, and not only among the royal families (Williams 1994, p. 115, p. 125, p. 132). As the Ovawambo widened their habitat, however, the political influence of the San gradually declined. At the same time, the Ovawambo kingdoms increased in authority, which in this chapter denotes accepted leadership or leaders who can exercise power over their subjects (Steinforth and Klocke-Daffa, this volume). This trend was further accelerated by a rinderpest outbreak, which emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century and dealt a devastating blow to vast areas including north-central Namibia. After the rinderpest epidemic, increasing numbers of the San either sought refuge at missionary stations, which were promoting missionary activities in the area at that time (see the next section), or served as bodyguards or executioners to the Ovawambo kings, while others eked out a meagre subsistence by bow-and-arrow hunting and gathering, leading a nomadic life. Some even served as slaves to the Ovawambo (Kreike 1996, p. 53; Peltola 2002, p. 71, p. 82, p. 181). Consequently, the San were pushed into a marginal sphere within the plural society. On the other hand, the Ovawambo had forged a value system stressing that the affluent Ovawambo should support the poor San and that the San should become more acculturated through developing a livelihood based on cultivating land and herding livestock. In comparison to San groups in other areas, however, the San in north-­ central Namibia are considered to have ‘lived well’ with their neighbouring agro-pastoralists (Suzman 2001, p.  34). When life became difficult due to conditions such as drought, many San people moved into Oshiwambo households, living together with them and assisting them with herding livestock and other tasks. Burglary and stock theft by San were rare in this region (Gordon and Douglas 2000, pp.  124–126, p. 240). Particularly in the Uukwanyama, where bush and forest covered a large area, the San enjoyed leeway to go back and forth between Oshikwanyama habitat and wilderness until relatively recently. In the

252 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

Uukwanyama, Ovawambo refugees from the northern floodplain hunted around Eenhana, the present capital of the Ohangwena region, in the 1910s, and settled there permanently in the 1920s and 1930s. The introduction of well technology at that time enabled the cattle post and settlement frontier to extend eastward beyond Eenhana (Kreike 2004, p. 130, p. 144). According to Takada (2015, pp.  47–49, pp. 121–128), by the 1920s or 1930s, the San groups (mainly the !Xun and ǂAkhoe) had already set up camp near Oshikwanyama residential areas in the western part of the present Ohangwena region. At Eenhana, some !Xun worked for the Ovawambo. They were able to obtain farm crops and even cattle, the most precious type of livestock, in exchange for their labour. Furthermore, the Ovawambo sometimes gave them pearl millet at no cost. By the 1950s, the !Xun had increasingly helped the Ovawambo to establish seasonal grazing lands for cattle, to open the wilderness, and to hunt in the eastern part of the Uukwanyama. As they were forming close relations with the Ovawambo, the most important subsistence activity of the !Xun was hunting and gathering. Therefore, the !Xun often moved their camps. These movements are broadly classified into (1) short-term movements for hunting-­gathering activities while maintaining the same base camp and (2) migration of the base camp itself. The base camps were frequently places where !Xun relatives lived. Their life unit consisted of several families linked by kinship relationships. As each family moved around the vast area, frequent fission and fusion of members occurred in the base camp. The presence of friendly Ovawambo nearby was also a reason for the selection of the base camp. Within the camp, important food items were distributed to everyone in the camp. Because it was necessary for them to move constantly in search of natural resources, the sense of territoriality was not strong among the !Xun. Rather, efforts were made to avoid setting a clear and permanent boundary between their living sphere and those of other groups. It was reported that among nomadic San groups such as the Ju|’hoan (Lee 1979) and the Gǀui/Gǁana (Tanaka 1980), prey obtained from hunting had to be distributed to every corner of the camp. This thorough distribution of important food items is thought to be based on the principle of general reciprocity (Sahlins 1974). Moreover, they took precautions to prevent a concentration of power in the hands of specific individuals, that is, to promote social levelling, by ensuring that the frequency of hunting was not biased towards a specific individual, giving a substantial portion of the prey to the owner of the hunting equipment and avoiding praising the successful hunter (Ichikawa 1991; Lee 1979; Tanaka 1980).

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

253

These features of an egalitarian society, found among the nomadic San groups, were also prevalent among the !Xun at that time (Takada 2015, pp. 47–49, pp. 121–128).

4   The Widespread Impact of Missionary Activities In many parts of Southern Africa, Christian missionary activities began to flourish around the eighteenth century. Among them, Protestant missionaries actively promoted Christianization, to ‘civilize’ African societies (Koizumi 2002). The movement reached north-central Namibia in the late nineteenth century. In 1870, the Finnish Missionary Society (FMS), in cooperation with the German Rhenish Missionary Society, opened the first mission station in north-central Namibia. Although FMS activity did not move forward easily in the beginning, it eventually spread across north-central Namibia. FMS activities were clearly delineated from the imperialism and the racial policies prevailing over southern Africa at that time. To pursue ‘genuine conversion’, FMS missionaries tried to form close relationships with the kings and local authorities of the Ovawambo in many areas. They also promoted the training of local religious leaders. This led to drastic changes in local communities, including the establishment of the indigenous church, the Evangelical Lutheran Ovambo/ Kavango Church (ELOC) in the 1950s (Hellberg 1997, pp.  207–213; Peltola 2002, pp. 87–96, p. 216, pp. 323–325). From the ELOC, there emerged groups who started to question the colonial rules (see the next section). Although the FMS and other evangelical missionary organizations focused their activities mainly on the Ovawambo, they showed a special interest in missionary work among the San from early on (Gordon and Douglas 2000, pp. 64–65, p. 144; Peltola 2002, p. 48). The long-cherished desire was put into practice right after ELOC was established. With the support of FMS, ELOC began to invite the San (mainly !Xun and ǂAkhoe) to settle at several sites, the largest of which was Ekoka. ELOC opened a church at Ekoka in the 1960s, and the missionaries promoted agriculture among those living there. They opened up a large area of farmland exclusively for the San. In other words, ELOC confirmed the legitimacy7 of the San with regard to use of the farmland. Moreover, the 7  In this chapter, ‘legitimacy’ denotes the institutional justification of authority (Steinforth and Klocke-Daffa, this volume).

254 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

missionaries introduced a cooperative farming system in which crops such as pearl millet, corn, beans, and pumpkins were cultivated. Elsewhere, the first author has referred to this farmland as a cooperative farm (e.g. Takada 2015, pp. 130–132). Subsequently, a number of San people began to shift from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle. Mr Sakariya, who is currently living in Okongo, assisted Ms Heikkinen, a Finnish missionary and linguist at Ekoka, who taught English and Afrikaans to the San for three years starting in 1971. According to Mr Sakariya, only a few Ovawambo lived around Ekoka at that time, while many San lived in the surrounding area, in contrast to the situation today. The San at Ekoka engaged in agriculture autonomously as their main subsistence activity. They had prosperous lives and secured an abundant food supply. It is noteworthy that the transition from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle was achieved among the Ekoka San (!Xun and ǂAkhoe) without engendering large opposition movements against the government, as occurred in other San groups, such as the G|ui/Gǁana who lived in the central part of Kalahari desert in Botswana (Sapignoli 2018) and the Haiǁom–ǂAkhoe in the area around the current Etosha National Park in Namibia (Dieckmann 2007). There is no doubt that the missionaries’ dedicated efforts (e.g. living at Ekoka over a long period and working closely with San people on a daily basis), which were motivated by the philanthropic impulses of Christianity and did not necessarily agree with the goals of the colonial government, contributed greatly to smoothing the transition. Indeed, this area stands out because the missionary organizations strongly criticized the educational and administrative policies of the colonial government (Takada 2013). However, the smooth transition could not have been accomplished solely by the missionaries’ efforts. Rather, the !Xun in this area are likely to have had several reasons for accepting the shift. First, they had formed close relationships with the Ovawambo by engaging with them in trade, labour, and intermarriage long before they met the missionaries. The relationships were not compulsory, but flexible; they could end the relationship if they chose to do so. Thus, established customs would have made it easier for them to live near the missionaries and pastors (of whom a considerable number were Ovawambo) and to engage in agricultural work. Although it is questionable whether the missionaries and pastors accomplished the ‘genuine conversion’ of ordinary San people, they were certainly highly respected in the area and exercised a new authoritative power at Ekoka.

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

255

Second, features of their egalitarian society matched up well with the missionaries’ activities. The nomadic lifestyle of the !Xun was based on cooperative work in hunting and gathering activities, delayed return on their contribution, and sharing of the hunted prey and collected plants among community members. Together, these are known features of egalitarian societies (see the prior section). When the missionary organizations began to develop Ekoka, they established the settlement and the large farmland exclusively for the San. People were expected to engage in agricultural work on the farmland collectively and cooperatively without occupying particular areas by household; then, after the harvest, they were expected to share the yield among the community members. Thus, clear similarities can be found between the San’s subsistence activities before and those after sedentarization. It should be remembered, however, that there were also significant differences between their subsistence activities before and those after sedentarization. First, by the time the missionary organizations set up the settlement and the farmland for the San, Ovawambo people already lived around Ekoka, although not as many as now. Therefore, the land boundary between the San and the Ovawambo was clearly delineated. The missionaries, who were promoting activities for the San, began managing the farmland while restricting the Ovawambo’s use of the San’s cooperative farm. The Ovawambo people did not publicly oppose the missionaries, who were highly and widely respected in the area. As a result, the interdependence between the San and Ovawambo gradually weakened. Second, while engaging in cooperative farming work, not only the missionaries but also several San (!Xun and ǂAkhoe) individuals, who were trained and educated by the missionary organizations, played central roles as leaders. The harvest was collected under the guidance of the missionaries and then distributed to each household. As mentioned earlier, the practices have some similarity to those of an egalitarian society. However, the earlier practice was different from the later one in that the missionaries directed these efforts and managed the farmland based on the ideology of Evangelical Christianity, with several San people taking leadership roles in accordance with the guidelines of the missionaries. By contrast, egalitarian societies carefully avoid the concentration of authority in particular individuals (see the prior section). To summarize, the missionary organizations regarded the San as heathens and diligently worked to achieve their enlightenment. The !Xun flexibly accepted the activities promoted by missionary organizations.

256 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

Consequently, the !Xun became more sedentary, which not only led to major changes in their land use but also nurtured those who played leading roles in promoting agricultural work. These changes reorganized the ways in which !Xun people were involved in power and authority.

5   Involvement of the San in the Liberation Movement In the latter half of the 1970s, the liberation movement from South Africa intensified, and the war began to spread around Ekoka. The South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), which played a central role in promoting the liberation movement, consisted mainly of Ovawambo lay people. For this reason, north-central Namibia, which was the homeland of the Ovawambo, was strongly affected by the liberation movement. As part of SWAPO’s activities, more than 100,000 Ovawambo are said to have moved their activity base to other countries. However, most areas of north-central Namibia were, at least on the surface, under the control of South Africa. The base of the South African Army (SAA) was located at Okongo. Under these circumstances, the SAA actively recruited San people, who were adept at moving through the bush, as scouts. Furthermore, the SAA tried to use the San for their political propaganda (Uys 1993, pp. 139–144). The message they aimed to convey to international society at large was that South Africa was supporting the indigenous San, who stood up against the communist guerrillas. A number of San people were recruited from Bushmanland, which was a homeland set aside for the San people by the apartheid government and had little association with SWAPO, but considerable numbers of San, including !Xun people, were recruited to the SAA in north-central Namibia (Takada 2015, pp. 75–76, pp. 139–140). Working conditions such as wages and welfare were much better in the SAA than the local standard. Furthermore, the SAA had a base at Okongo and exerted overriding power over the local people, including the chiefs and headmen of the Ovawambo. As Ekoka was on the route from the area dominated by the SAA to the SWAPO bases in Angola, there were frequent movements of soldiers through the area. The SAA kept a close watch on the local people, making them afraid to voice their opinions regarding political issues. In actuality, however, a number of !Xun people sympathized with SWAPO’s idea of resisting the overriding power of the SAA. As a notable

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

257

example, Mr JH, who was 15 years old at the time, joined SWAPO after attending a secret meeting held at night, and went to Angola where the base was located. In Angola, JH was educated at a school hosted by SWAPO and achieved excellent grades. Then, he gained an opportunity to study in Cuba and East Germany (Takada 2015, pp. 70–74). As his life story indicates, lifestyles of the San were diversified, and some of them became directly involved in global ideological struggles. Many SWAPO members were closely associated with ELOC (renamed ELCIN in 1984), which had continued community-based activities. ELOC, which did not always follow the policies of the colonial governments, was among the earliest to support SWAPO’s liberation movement. The SAA did not like this and began to interfere with ELOC/ELCIN activities in various ways. Consequently, Mr Sakariya and Ms Heikkinen had no choice but to withdraw from Ekoka. The SAA also issued a night-­ time curfew and a ban on meetings, which imposed restrictions on various social activities. As a result, missionary activities at Ekoka declined considerably, and the rate at which families engaged in agriculture decreased greatly. Under these circumstances, not only the San people who were recruited by either the SAA or the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN, the military wing of SWAPO) but also many San civilians moved out of Ekoka. Still, many !Xun remained, and their reliance on the Ovawambo intensified. An increasing number of men and women of all ages worked in the households and farmland of the Ovawambo, who supported them in cash or in kind. Because of the excess labour supply, the wage rate declined. The Ovawambo, for their part, needed San labour. As previously mentioned, many Ovawambo, perhaps more than 100,000 people, were in exile due to the liberation movement at that time. Additionally, about 50,000 men were being sent annually to the mines, factories, and white settlers’ farms in the south under the contract labour system (Hellberg 1997, pp.  9–12; Hishongwa 1992, p.  59). Consequently, the ratio of women to men in the adult population increased, requiring changes in family relationships and in the gender division of labour practised earlier. It became difficult for Ovawambo men to fulfil their responsibility (e.g. feeding their family, taking care of their cattle, and looking after their house) as household heads or husbands. When the man left home for a long time, the remaining woman had to take on full responsibility as the head of the household (Hishongwa 1992, pp. 87–109). Under these circumstances, the San who remained in north-central Namibia partially made up for the Ovawambo labour shortage. This (re)strengthened the

258 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

alliance between the !Xun and the Ovawambo and the influence of the Ovawambo on the livelihoods of the !Xun increased. In the meantime, some !Xun (and many ǂAkhoe) individuals began to place greater importance on hunting and gathering, as they had before they settled at the missionary village. Facing destitution and the upheaval of non-white identity in northern Namibia, the !Xun of Ekoka shifted back to a subjugated position in Oshiwambo society or reverted to their earlier life as hunter-­ gatherers. The weaker politico-economic situation resulted in a decline of the !Xun in the regional power structure. Note that a similar shift in the politico-economic situation was observed during the rinderpest pandemic around the end of the nineteenth century (see section ‘The Development of a Plural Society’). Thus, San subsistence patterns have not been static but have changed flexibly according to internal and external contexts (Takada 2015, pp. 74–76, pp. 138–143).

6   Developmental Activities on Behalf of the San Namibia achieved independence in 1990, and the new government was legitimized, with SWAPO as the ruling party. Support for the San, which had been greatly reduced during the liberation movement, was resumed. Nevertheless, the main body responsible for supporting the San changed from the missionary organizations, namely the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN) and its parent organization, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), to two governmental agencies, the Ministry of Lands, Resettlement, and Rehabilitation (MLRR)8 and the National Planning Commission (NPC), a subordinate body of the Office of the President.9 Since independence, projects to support the San in the Ohangwena Region (hereinafter, the San Projects) have been operated at four project sites: Ekoka, Eendobe, Onamatadiva, and Oshanashiwa. Of the activities conducted by the missionary organization, agricultural  The MLRR was later reorganized and renamed several times; it is currently called the Ministry of Land Reform (MLR). 9  For a period of five years, both missionary organizations and government agencies were involved in managing these activities. Then, from the latter half of the 1990s, the activities were completely controlled by governmental agencies. The activities transferred from the missionary organization to governmental agencies have also been developed in other areas within the country. For example, in the NyaeNyae Constituency, part of the former Bushmanland, where many San people live, ELCIN and LWF cooperated with MLRR and NPC to implement settlement and food support projects. However, the projects failed due to inadequate planning, such as insufficient research into the San’s basic living environment and lack of food (Welch 2018). In comparison with such cases, the project in Ekoka is considered to be successful within the country (Takada 2015). 8

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

259

support was taken over by the MLRR, and areas other than agriculture were transferred to the NPC.  Specifically, the NPC implements a wide range of activities including infrastructure development such as electricity and water, dwelling construction, food distribution, and support for the production of handicrafts, which provides sources of cash income. The shift of authority from missionary to government organizations brought changes in land use at Ekoka. MLRR fenced the large cooperative farm at Ekoka, created for the San before independence. The cooperative farm is divided into two sections (hereafter, Areas A and B). Areas A and B cover about 70 hectares and 86 hectares, respectively. MLRR officials and several San (!Xun and ǂAkhoe) people who actively engaged in agriculture under missionary control played central roles in the resumption of agricultural activities. MLRR also provided broad support for agricultural materials. Collaborative labour, which had been carried out prior to independence, was also resumed (Fig. 1). However, the number of freeriding households, that is, those that did not contribute to the cooperative labour but tried to obtain a share of the harvest, gradually increased. People regarded this as a problem. They therefore decided to divide part of the cooperative farm by household. Each household was expected to work in

Fig. 1  !Xun people weeding at the cooperative farm at Ekoka, 2000. (Photo by Akira Takada)

260 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

the allotted farmland. Moreover, although only a small number of Ovawambo, such as pastors, were allowed to use the cooperative farm before independence, Ovawambo people were gradually permitted to use part of the cooperative farm (Miyake and Takada forthcoming). This movement has the following background. After independence, the population of north-central Namibia surged because a number of exiles returned. The resettlement of those people and the reform of the land use/tenure system were among the most important issues in the nation-­ building process of post-independence Namibia. In north-central Namibia, people seeking land began to create an overflow. Due to post-­independence turmoil, land enclosure became prevalent. The Ovawambo have suffered a serious and chronic land shortage. At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult for the San to resume a nomadic lifestyle based on hunting and gathering activities in the bush, which has been rapidly decreasing. The competition for land also intensified around Ekoka. Consequently, increasing numbers of Ovawambo people wanted to use part of the cooperative farm. Because the cooperative farm had been operated as part of the San Project, several regulations were set for Ovawambo use of the farm. The maximum area of land to be used was one hectare per household, and yearly rent was set at N$150 per hectare (approximately US$8.84 in July 2020). Additionally, Ovawambo users of the cooperative farm were required to provide some of the harvest to the San free of charge and contribute to the restoration of the fence surrounding the cooperative farm. However, more and more Ovawambo began to use the cooperative farm while ignoring the above regulations. It was difficult for the MLRR/MLR officers and San people to impose sanctions against them, and most San people have tolerated this activity. Problems between the San and the Ovawambo regarding land use are not limited to Ovawambo use of the cooperative farm. For example, the fence around the cooperative farm was often destroyed, allowing Oshiwambo livestock to enter the cooperative farm. A !Xun man interpreted these incidents as Ovawambo jealousy of the government’s generous agricultural support of the San (Takada 2015, p.  80). !Xun people reported such incidents to the MLRR/MLR. However, reparations were rarely paid by the Ovawambo. Legitimate use of the cooperative farm, which the missionary organizations had authorized exclusively for the San, has weakened since the MLRR took over its management. Those problems are closely associated with differences between the San (!Xun and ǂAkhoe) and Ovawambo peoples in attitudes about the land.

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

261

The !Xun of Ekoka have lived a sedentary lifestyle for several decades. However, when the missionaries were active, they were largely responsible for managing the farmland, and the !Xun people concentrated mainly on using the produce. Therefore, the sense of occupying the farmland may not have been as strong among the !Xun people. On the other hand, the Ovawambo have historically cultivated farmland exclusively for each household. They have established conventions to occupy the utility right of the farmland. This gap in attitudes between the San and the Ovawambo emerged when both parties began to use the cooperative farm (Miyake and Takada forthcoming). Additionally, new authorities, namely international organizations (e.g. UNESCO) and NGOs (e.g. the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa, the Rössing Foundation), also became actively engaged in developmental activities targeting the San after independence. These organizations have emphasized social problems faced by the San people, such as the violation of human rights and extinction of indigenous culture, in addition to poverty. Moreover, they have associated such social problems with those experienced by many other indigenous peoples all over the world. Thus, they locate the San in the context of the crisis of world indigenous and minority populations and authorize the legitimacy of their voices to promote affirmative actions. In this sense, the images of San produced by the international organizations and NGOs are significantly different from those generated by the government, which has officially acknowledged all traditional communities residing in the country (except for white and Asian communities) as indigenous, but has, at the same time, shown a paternalistic attitude towards the San people (Takada 2015, pp. 81–82).

7   Conclusion Land use by the !Xun, who had lived a nomadic lifestyle in north-central Namibia for a long time, changed greatly with the shift to a sedentary lifestyle. In this concluding section, we examine the ‘excludability’ and ‘subtractability’ (Ostrom 2005) of !Xun land use, according to the time period, to understand these changes more fully. When the !Xun lived a nomadic lifestyle, their subsistence activities took place in the bush, where they used natural resources without eliminating other San groups such as the ǂAkhoe or groups such as the Ovawambo. Although the Ovawambo were mainly engaged in farming

262 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

and livestock herding, there were many occasions when they used the bush for timber procurement, livestock grazing, and occasional hunting and gathering activities. In such cases, many !Xun people were willing to cooperate with the Ovawambo in the bush, which can yield largely nonsubtractive benefits. The land boundary had not been clearly set. Therefore, both excludability and subtractability of land use were low in the bush. In Ovawambo households, the Ovawambo and !Xun formed patron–client relationships in which the Ovawambo offered rewards in cash or in kind, which were the sources of their authority, to the humbler !Xun in return for their service and loyalty (Takada 2015, pp. 56–57, pp. 93–95). When the missionary organizations began to promote settlement of the San in the 1950s, they also began managing the San’s settlement sites. At Ekoka, the missionaries and their collaborators demarcated the San’s farmland, maintained the boundary, and managed the cooperative farm. They also monitored the Ovawambo to prevent them indiscriminately entering and using the San’s cooperative farm. As a result, the land of the San became a property that excluded other people. Thus, the issue of subtractability of land use did not arise with the Ovawambo. These were significant changes that affected the foundation of the !Xun’s life. When it came to the latter half of the 1970s, some !Xun were involved in the liberation movement (on both the SWAPO and SAA sides). Many !Xun people left Ekoka, and some of them revived the nomadic life in the bush, where sufficient land was available, so both the excludability and subtractability of land use were low. However, the majority of !Xun remained at Ekoka. As the cooperative farm at Ekoka was largely non-­ functional (so neither excludability nor subtractability of land use was an issue there), they increased their reliance on the Ovawambo people. Consequently, the location of the !Xun’s subsistence activities moved to Ovawambo households and farmlands, where they revived the patron–client relationship with the Ovawambo. After independence, the San of Ekoka resumed the sedentary lifestyle based on agriculture in the cooperative farm. However, the role of managing the San’s land has shifted from missionary to governmental organizations. During the initial phase of agriculture revitalization, MLRR officials were responsible for protecting the cooperative farm from the Ovawambo. Accordingly, the excludability of the farmland increased again. However, as MLRR/MLR activities weakened in terms of human resources, budget, labour force, and so on, the balance of such forces changed. Given the rapid population increase and land shortages across north-central Namibia,

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

263

resumption of the nomadic lifestyle has been less feasible for the San. Under these circumstances, the !Xun have gradually re-established a life dependent on the Ovawambo. At the same time, use of the cooperative farm by the Ovawambo has progressed. As a result, the excludability of the cooperative farm has been weakening, and the subtractability of land use among the !Xun, ǂAkhoe, and Ovawambo peoples has become an issue. Thus, the cooperative farm may descend into the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin 1968) in the near future. The question of whether the relevant actors can find a balanced solution would be an important subject from the perspectives of both local practitioners and scholars. In summary, at Ekoka, when the San had a land manager, the excludability of the farmland was enhanced, and the !Xun could live a sedentary lifestyle by collectively occupying the farmland. However, without such a land manager, the excludability of the farmland immediately declined. Subsequently, many !Xun (re)vitalized the patron–client relationship with the Ovawambo, while others (re)strengthened their hunting and gathering activities. On the other hand, the subtractability of land use was not a concern when the !Xun engaged in a nomadic lifestyle, moving around a vast living area. Even after sedentarization, the cooperative farm developed for the San was large enough for them to make a living. However, due to increasing steps by the Ovawambo to use the cooperative farm in recent years, it may be that the !Xun, ǂAkhoe, and Ovawambo people will compete with each other for the use of the cooperative farm. As discussed in this chapter, issues of excludability and subtractability over the land have made a clear difference to the power dynamics between the !Xun and the ethnic groups and organizations with whom they interact. Exercising power and having power exercised over one are both forms of social relationship. Nevertheless, our analysis indicates that, if we do this without respecting the other party, such social relationships will not last long, but will provoke social conflicts. The post-independence government has made considerable efforts to incorporate traditional authority into its legitimacy. However, it is difficult to conclude what should be called ‘traditional’ for a society that has repeatedly undergone such major reorganizations. At least, no matter what conclusions are made, it will involve a highly political judgement in the actual process of nation building and implementation of development policies. Further investigation and consideration regarding the !Xun’s struggle for cultural and political recognition on their land would bring about a deeper understanding of their distinct ethnicity and social cohesiveness and also

264 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

provide a new perspective on the regional history and future development of north-central Namibia.

References Barnard, Alan (1992). Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, Dhyani J. / Zimprich-Mazive, Elke (2002). New Horizons for the San: Participatory Action Research with San Communities in Northern Namibia. Windhoek: UNESCO Windhoek Office. Bleek, Dorothea F. (1929). Comparative Vocabularies of Bushman Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bleek, Dorothea F. (1924). Bushman Terms of Relationship. In: Bantu Studies, 2, pp. 57–70. Boden, Gertrud / Takada, Akira (2014). Kx’a Kinship Classifications: A Diachronic Perspective. In: Barnard, Alan / Boden, Gertrud (Eds.), Southern African Khoisan Kinship Systems. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, pp. 141–160. Brown, Tom (1979). Setswana-English Dictionary. (First published in 1895) Braamfontein: Pula Press. Climate-data.org (2020). Okongo Climate (Namibia). Retrieved from https:// en.climate-­data.org/africa/namibia/ohangwena-­region/okongo-­26554/ Dieckmann, Ute / Thiem, Maarit / Dirkx, Erik / Hays, Jennifer (Eds.) (2014). Scraping the Pot: San in Namibia Two Decades after Independence. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Centre. Dieckmann, Ute (2007). Haiǁom in the Etosha Region: A History of Colonial Settlement, Ethnicity, and Nature Conservation. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Gordon, Robert J. / Douglas, Stuart S. (2000). The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass. (First published in 1992) Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Güldemann, Tom (2014). ‘Khoisan’ Linguistic Classification Today. In: Güldemann, Tom / Fehn, Anne-Maria (Eds.), Beyond ‘Khoisan’: Historical Relations in the Kalahari Basin. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 1–40. Hardin, Garrett (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. In: Science 162 (3859), pp. 1243–1248. Heikkinen, Terttu (1987). An Outline of the Grammar of the !Xun Language Spoken in Ovamboland and Western Kavango. In: South African Journal of Language, 7, (Supplement 1), pp. 1–112. Hellberg, Carl-J. (1997). Mission Colonialism and Liberation: The Lutheran Church in Namibia 1840–1966. Windhoek: New Namibia Books.

  CHANGES IN ETHNICITY AND LAND RIGHTS 

265

Hishongwa, Ndeutala (1992). The Contract Labour System and Its Effects on Family and Social Life in Namibia: A Historical Perspective. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan Publishers. Hitchcock, Robert K. (2012). Refugees, Resettlement, and Land and Resource Conflicts: The Politics of Identity among !Xun and Khwe San in Northeastern Namibia. In: African Study Monographs, 33 (2), pp. 73–132. Honneth, Axel (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ichikawa, Mitsuo (1991). Egalitarianism from the Perspective of Evolutional History. In: Tanaka, Jiro / Kakeya, Makoto (Eds.), Natural History of Humans. Tokyo: Heibonsha, pp. 11–34 (in Japanese). Kiema, Kuela (2010). Tears for My Land: A Social History of the Kua of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Tc’amnqoo. Gaborone: Mmegi Publishing House. König, Christa / Heine, Bernd (2001). The !Xun of Ekoka: A Demographic and Linguistic Report. Köln: Khoisan Forum. Koizumi, Mari (2002). Meaning of Christianization in African Society: Consideration from the Faith Awakening Movement in Kinga Society. In: Senri Ethnological Reports (31), pp. 213–234 (in Japanese). Kreike, Emmanuel H. (2004). Recreating Eden: Land Use, Environment, and Society in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Kreike, Emmanuel H. (1996). Recreating Eden: Agro-Ecological Change, Food Security and Environmental Diversity in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia, 1890–1960. PhD Dissertation, Yale University. Kuper, Leo (1997). Plural Society. In: Guibernau, Montserrat / Rex, John (Eds.), The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Migration. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 220–228. Lee, Richard B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Richard B. / DeVore, Irven (Eds.) (1968). Man the Hunter. Chicago, IL: Aldine Atherton. Miyake, Erika / Takada, Akira (forthcoming). Land Use and Interethnic Relationships between the !Xun and the Ovawambo in Post-independent North-Central Namibia. Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) (2011a). Namibia 2011 Population and Housing. Windhoek: Namibia Statistics Agency. Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) (2011b). Ohangwena 2011 Census Regional Profile. Windhoek: Namibia Statistics Agency. Ostrom, Elinor (2005). Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Peltola, Matti (2002). Nakambale: The Life of Dr. Martin Rautanen. Helsinki: Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission.

266 

A. TAKADA AND E. MIYAKE

Pohamba-Ndume, Kaleinasho N. (2016). An Investigation into the Poverty Situation of the Haiǁom People Resettled at Okongo Constituency in the Ohangwena Region. Master Thesis, University of Namibia. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. (1952). Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses. London: Cohen & West Ltd. Sahlins, Marshall D. (1974). Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock Publications. Sapignoli, Maria (2018). Hunting Justice: Displacement, Law, and Activism in the Kalahari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stutzriemer, Manja (2020). Teilen und Geben in neuen Kontexten. !Xun in Nkurenkuru, Namibia, zwischen Anpassung und Ausgrenzung. PhD thesis, University of Tuebingen. Suzman, James (2001). An Assessment of the Status of the San in Namibia. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Centre. Takada, Akira (2015). Narratives of San Ethnicity: The Cultural and Social Foundations of Lifeworld among !Xun of North-Central Namibia. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press. Takada, Akira (2013). A Study on Educational Reform in Namibia: Educational Practices for the !Xun San in Owamboland. In: Africa Educational Research Journal, 4, pp. 19–34 (in Japanese). Takada, Akira (2008). Kinship and Naming among the Ekoka !Xun. In: Ermisch, Sonja (Ed.), Khoisan Languages and Linguistics: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium, January 8-12, 2006, Riezlern / Kleinwalsertal. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, pp. 303–322. Tanaka, Jiro (1980). The San: Hunter-Gatherers of the Kalahari: A Study in Ecological Anthropology. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Uys, Ian S. (1993). Bushman Soldiers: Their Alpha and Omega. Germiston: Fortress Publishers. Vossen, Rainer (Ed.) (2013). The Khoesan Languages. Abingdon: Routledge. Welch, Cameron (2018). Land is Life, Conservancy is Life: The San and the Nǂa Jaqna Conservancy, Tsumkwe District West, Namibia. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Widlok, Thomas (1999). Living on Mangetti: ‘Bushman’ Autonomy and Namibian Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Frieda-Nela (1994). Precolonial Communities of Southwestern Africa: A History of Owambo Kingdoms 1600–1920. (First published in 1991) Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia. Wilmsen, Edwin N. (1990). The Real Bushman in the Male One: Labour and Power in the Creation of Basarwa Ethnicity. In: Botswana Notes and Records, 22, pp. 21–35. Wilmsen, Edwin N. (1989). Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

San Traditional Authorities, Communal Conservancies, Conflicts, and Leadership in Namibia Robert K. Hitchcock, Wayne A. Babchuk, and Judith Frost

1   Introduction One of the most contentious issues in southern Africa today is the role of traditional authorities (chiefs, headmen, headwomen) in the modern nation-state (Baldwin 2015; Buthelezi et  al. 2019; Chigudu 2015; Chlouba 2019; d’Engelbronner, Hinz and Sindano 1998; Keulder 2000, 1998, 1997; Logan 2008; Oomen 2005). Historically, particularly in precolonial times, traditional authorities played key roles in the management of social and political aspects of society. They had a large say over land and resource matters, and they served as arbiters of disputes at the local level

R. K. Hitchcock (*) University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA e-mail: [email protected] W. A. Babchuk University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA J. Frost Kalahari People’s Fund, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_10

267

268 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

(Holm and Botlhale 2008; Schapera 1970, 1938; Vail 1989). With the coming of independence in southern Africa, countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe sought to reduce the roles of traditional authorities in favour of state institutions such as land boards and district councils. In Namibia, there was considerable debate about how to handle the role of traditional leaders in the run-up to independence, and this debate intensified once independence was achieved on 21 March 1990 (Government of the Republic of Namibia 1991; Hinz 2008, 2004; Hinz and Gairiseb 2016; Hinz and Patemann 2006; Republic of Namibia 1997; Werner 2018). The Traditional Authorities Act of 1995 was followed by the Traditional Authorities Act of 2000, which defined a traditional authority as “a chief, a head of a traditional community, a senior traditional councilor, or a traditional councilor” (Republic of Namibia 2000, pp.  2–4, Definitions and Section 2[1]). The act defines a ‘traditional community’ as “an indigenous homogeneous endogamous social grouping of persons which share[s] a common ancestry, language, cultural heritage, customs and traditions and inhabits a common communal area” (Republic of Namibia 2000, p.  3). The act empowers the traditional authorities to administer and execute customary laws. Each traditional authority may appoint a council to assist in decision making. This chapter considers the various issues that arose in the course of establishment of traditional authorities in Namibia, with particular attention to people who were considered to lack formal institutionalized leaders, notably the San (Bushmen) who make up a relatively small proportion of Namibia’s population. Specifically, the question we ask is: Under what conditions do leaders emerge in egalitarian, sharing-based, small-scale societies? We focus on the hypothesis that democratically elected leaders tend to operate in the interests of their constituents more commonly than do ‘traditional leaders’ who are appointed by government and who lack popular support. As Keulder (2000, p. 154) noted, “At least three important issues confronted policymakers immediately after Namibia’s Independence.” The first related to the recognition of the ‘real’ traditional leaders, given the difficulty in distinguishing between those who were appointed by the communities, and those who were appointed by the colonial administration. The second issue concerned bringing the institution of traditional leadership into the broad legal and policy framework of the Namibian state. Important to consider in this regard were issues such as communal

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

269

land administration, gender equity, democratic governance, and rural development. The third issue dealt with finding an appropriate role for the traditional leadership institution in the day-to-day administration of the country. Government was also faced with how to go about ensuring appropriate remuneration for activities performed. Keulder (2000, p. 155) went on to assert that at least three broad models of traditional leadership exist in Namibia. These are (1) kingdoms, (2) chieftainships and (3) headmanships. The first of these models can be seen in the case of the Ovambo communities in northern Namibia, which were organized hierarchically and overseen by kings with considerable power (Hinz and Namwonde 2010, Keulder 2000, pp. 155–156; Malan 1995, pp. 14–34). The second, chieftainship, is found among the Kavango (Hinz and Namwonde 2010; Malan 1995, pp. 35–54), among the Mafwe and Subiya in East Caprivi (now Zambezi Region) (Malan 1995, pp. 55–66), and the Herero (Gewald 1999; Hinz and Gairiseb 2016, pp.  257–421; Malan 1995, pp. 67–84). The third, headmanship, is found among Himba (Ovahimba) (Werner 2020) and Nama groups (Hinz and Gairiseb 2016, pp. 23–254; Keulder 2000, p.159; Malan 1995, pp. 114–127). There are also intermediate forms of leadership models such as the Paramount Chief of the Herero and the Kapteins among Nama groups such as the Gideon Nama. In addition, some of the Damara have political leaders who resemble chiefs (see Hinz and Gairiseb 2013, pp.183–449). However, it should be noted that Keulder’s models left out the type of leadership most common among the San, who normally come to public consensus after extensive discussions of issues with all adults and sometimes children participating. After independence, the Namibian government recognised 36 traditional authorities and 176 traditional leaders (Keulder 1997, p.  168). Recognised traditional leaders were paid according to three wage categories: Chiefs received N$700 a month (US$150 by 1997 calculations), Senior Headmen received N$450 a month (US$100), and Headmen received N$300 a month (US$65). Initially, those communities who were seen as acephalous did not have any chiefs or headmen appointed by government even if they applied for the right to have a traditional authority. Among those communities were the San, who even now are considered ‘marginalised communities’ by the Government of Namibia (Division of Marginalized Communities 2018a, b). The balance of this chapter looks at the cases of traditional authorities in two of the approximately ten San communities in Namibia.

270 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

2   San Traditional Authorities Following the passage of the original Traditional Authorities Act in Namibia in 1995 (see Hinz and Joas 1995; Republic of Namibia 1995), several San groups held elections to choose their own traditional authorities. At first the government did not confirm those who had been elected and did not appoint any San TAs, presumably because the prevailing view was that the San lacked chiefs or other kinds of community leaders. Eventually, in 1998, the government relented and confirmed the appointment of several San traditional authorities. Today, there are 51 recognized traditional authorities in Namibia, with at least another 20 applications that are pending. Of these, seven are San (see Table 1). One San group, the Khwe, who reside in the Kavango East and Zambezi Regions, have not had a traditional authority approved in spite of numerous applications to government (Boden 2020). The first two San traditional authorities elected and later recognized officially (in 1998) were those of the Ju/’hoansi in Nyae Nyae and the !Kung in N≠a Jaqna. Both of these traditional authorities are located in Tsumkwe District, Otjozondjupa Region, one of the 14 administrative regions in the country. (Tsumkwe is also the name of a municipality located in Tsumkwe District that serves as commercial hub for the region.) For the Ju/’hoansi, the individual who rose to prominence and was eventually elected to serve as the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority was Tsamkxao ≠Oma, a well-known and influential individual among the Ju/’hoansi who had served as the chairperson of the Ju/wa Bushman Development Foundation (JBDF) (see Fig.  1). Tsamkxao ≠Oma was elected unanimously by the Ju/’hoansi in Nyae Nyae in early 1998 and confirmed by the government in July 1998. Long a spokesperson for the Ju/’hoansi, Tsamkxao ≠Oma had led a delegation of Ju/’hoansi to the 1991 Namibia land conference and had spoken out forcefully for the recognition of Ju/’hoan land rights. Tsamkxao ≠Oma and the Ju/’hoansi later collaborated with government in the establishment of Nyae Nyae as Namibia’s first communal conservancy in line with the government’s Nature Conservation Amendment Act of 1996 (Republic of Namibia 1996). In Namibia, conservancies are locally planned and managed multipurpose areas on communal land in which land users have pooled their resources for wildlife conservation, tourism, and wildlife utilization. Under Namibian government legislation, conservancy formation requires a formal legal constitution, a

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

271

Table 1  San traditional authorities in Namibia Group name

Traditional authority

Date of designation

Contact data

Additional information

Ju/’hoansi

Tsamkxao ≠Oma //’áíhaà

1 July 1998

Nyae Nyae Conservancy

!Kung

Glony Arnold (John Arnold, 1998–2012) //’áíhaà !A/ae Frederick Langman //’áíhaà Hendrik Martin (was Sofia Jacobs to 23 October 2014)!xàa àa David // Khamuxab !khōdana-ao Pending

28 March, 2015

Private Bag 2070 Grootfontein P.O. Box 41,600 Aussanplatz

ǂKao //Aesi ǂX’ao-||’aen // Au//eisi !Xóõ

Hai//om

Khwe ǂKhomani (ǂKhomanin) Division of Marginalised Communities, Office of the President

Juliane Gawa!Nas, Josephat Gawa!nab Kxao Royal /o/o Gerson Kamatuka,

N≠a Jaqna Conservancy

5 July 1998

P.O. Box 423 Gobabis

Omaheke North

1 July 2009, 30 October, 2014

P.O. Box 1017 Omaheke Gobabis South

17 December P.O. Box 86 2004 Outjo

Outjo, Kunene Region

Pending

Rundu

19 September 2014 2005

P.O. Box 22,750 Aro-Vial Private Bag 12,229 Windhoek

Kavango East and Zambezi Region Nama-Damara, Khomas Region Country-wide

representative conservancy committee elected by the members, a land use and management plan, and formally defined boundaries (Gargallo 2020; Naidoo et  al. 2016). The local traditional authority plays an important role along with the Nyae Nyae Conservancy Management Committee, assisting them with policymaking and advising them on ways to go about handling complex issues. At present, there are some 86 communal conservancies in Namibia (Namibian Association of Community Based Organizations 2020). The largest of these conservancies is the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy, which was gazetted in 2003, and covers some 9120 km2. The Nyae Nyae Conservancy,

272 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

Fig. 1  Photograph of Tsamxao ≠Oma and community members, 1992. (Photo by Paul Weinberg)

the first communal conservancy gazetted in Namibia, has an area of 8992 km2 and is bordered by N≠a Jaqna on the west, the Botswana border on the east, the Kavango Region and the Khaudum National Park on the north, and the Redline Veterinary Cordon Fence on the south (see Fig. 2). The process of mapping of the conservancies was time-consuming and involved extensive community consultations. It is important to note that the original territory of the Ju/’hoansi extended into Botswana and covered some 70,000  km2. Until the early part of the new millennium,

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

273

Fig. 2  Map of N≠a Jaqna and Nyae Nyae Conservancies, Namibia

Ju/’hoansi San had the right to cross the Botswana-Namibia border without having to show passports. The Ju/’hoansi, like other egalitarian societies, were organized into bands which were groups of people, generally between 25 and 50 in number, that were characterized by (a) kinship (i.e. blood) relationships, (b) marital ties, (c) economic ties (e.g. reciprocity), (d) labour-sharing, (e) locality (i.e. they have a common territory), (f) a collective perception of unity, (g) a shared language, (h) information sharing, (i) a shared history and (j) a shared set of traditions, values, and beliefs. They did not have institutionalized leadership or hereditary chieftainship but rather influential individuals who sought public consensus on important decisions. The Ju/’hoansi had core people in each of these bands called k’xau n!asi, but they were not formal headmen or headwomen whose position was institutionalized (L. Marshall 1976, pp. 191–198). These individuals did not have the power to tell others what to do but would talk over issues with the community until consensus was reached. When members of another group wished to enter the territory of a band, they had to approach the k’xau n!a, who discussed the issue of allowing others to enter the territory and ‘drink their water’ with the community before coming to a decision. The k’xau n!a is also not a judge in cases of disagreements among

274 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

band members; disputes were resolved between individuals, often with other community members taking part in the discussions. Formal sanctions were not imposed on individuals except in the case of people who habitually engaged in repeated misbehaviour, including committing violence against others, who eventually might be asked to leave the band. The k’xau n!a was expected to be generous and to ensure that he or she did not accumulate goods or have services rendered on his or her behalf. Some of the first detailed ethnographic work among the Ju/’hoansi was carried out by the Marshall family, who, while not trained formally in anthropology, worked in the Nyae Nyae region of Namibia between 1951 and 1958 (see L. Marshall 1976, pp. 1–11). The Marshalls’ insights into Ju/’hoan kinship, social organization, subsistence, land use, and cosmology were theoretically informed and highly significant (see J.  Marshall 2003; L. Marshall 1999, 1976, 1960). They not only influenced subsequent Kalahari researchers but impacted the entire field of cultural anthropology as well. Through a series of ethnographic films made by John Marshal over a 50-year period, these issues reached a world audience and some of the indigenous participants became international celebrities of sorts. The person who was the k’xau n!a (but not the leader or headman) at Gautscha Pan, where the Marshalls first camped, was ≠Toma, an excellent hunter whose kindness, generosity, and pleasant personality were deeply appreciated by his fellow band members. ≠Toma did not involve himself directly in dispute resolution, though he was willing to express his opinions about social issues in an understated way (Ritchie 1987). ≠Toma’s son Tsamkxao ≠Oma, who was later to become the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority, stood out because of his level-headedness, charisma, rhetorical skills, and speaking abilities. Some Ju/’hoansi began referring to Tsamkxao ≠Oma as a //’áíhaà, or headman. Tsamkxao ≠Oma had stood up for Ju/’hoan land rights when some Herero pastoralists, originally from Botswana, moved into Nyae Nyae in 1991–1992. He sought the support of the Minister of Lands who came to Tsumkwe, who said that the Ju/’hoansi had the rights to their land, water, grazing, and forest. It was not surprising, therefore, that when the Ju/’hoansi held elections in 1998, Tsamkxao ≠Oma was chosen to be the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority. John Arnold of the !Kung, a former soldier in the South African Defence Force, and a colleague and friend of Tsamkxao ≠Oma, was elected as the !Kung TA in N≠a Jaqna in 1998. Mr Arnold had been born in the

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

275

Omatako area of Tsumkwe District West and thus was indigenous to the area. Omatako is in a fossil river valley that lies to the west of Nyae Nyae and the community there had become the administrative centre for the !Kung people (Hays et al. 2014; Welch 2018). Mr Arnold saw the people of N≠a Jaqna through some tumultuous times, including the government’s decision to relocate a large refugee camp, Osire, to M’Kata in the N≠a Jaqna area in 2000–2001, a plan with which Mr Arnold disagreed vehemently (Hitchcock 2012, 2001, pp. 104–105). There were also tensions with Nyae Nyae over the setting of the boundary between the two conservancies in 2001–2002 (Hitchcock 2012, pp. 107–108; Hohmann 2003, pp. 230–232). Eventually, the boundary was agreed upon between John Arnold and Tsamkxao ≠Oma and the two conservancy management committees, with the assistance of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, which oversees the communal conservancies in Namibia. Unfortunately, John Arnold died as a result of an automobile accident on 8 July 2012 in which his wife !Nuse and grandson Duggery were also killed. His funeral in Omatako was attended by many dignitaries and community members, including the then president of Namibia, Hifikepunye Pohamba. The !Kung Traditional Authority position went unfilled for the next three years, and much of the work was done by !Kung Traditional Authority councillors. The !Kung and Khwe held an election for the TA position in 2012, after John Arnold’s death, and selected a !Kung woman, Sarah Zungu, who had been a member of the !Kung Traditional Authority council. Sarah Zungu was later the chairperson of the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy management committee, which had frequently come into conflict with the !Kung Traditional Authority committee, particularly over land issues. The Government of Namibia apparently did not see Sarah Zungu as a strong supporter of the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO), the ruling party. She was known for calling for investigations into John Arnold’s land allocations, and after Mr Arnold’s death, into those by some of his traditional councillors, which she thought were fraudulent. The Government of Namibia wanted to appoint John Arnold’s daughter, Glony Arnold, as the new !Kung Traditional authority, in part because of her strong support for SWAPO, but this was not what many people in the Tsumkwe West area wanted (Nampa 2015a). The government, for its part, arguably wanted to have a traditional authority who would do its bidding and who would serve its interests in the Council of Traditional

276 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

Leaders. In effect, the Government of Namibia overrode the community’s established rights to elect their own traditional authority. The position of !Kung Traditional Authority was eventually transferred to Glony Arnold, a colonel in the Namibian Air Force. She was installed officially on 28 March 2015 by the Government of Namibia (Nampa 2015b). The ceremony, held at Tsumkwe, resembled the crowning of a chief; an actual crown and the word ‘chief’ were used in the ceremonies. The reaction of many of the !Kung and Khwe residents to this appointment was quite negative since they felt that the !Kung did not have a ‘royal house’ which allowed for the rank of the traditional authority to be passed down from one generation to the next. This type of bequeathed status ran contrary to the historical egalitarian leadership that characterized !Kung groups and the emergence of leaders through achieved rather than ascribed status. The question of who speaks for the community continued to be an issue in N≠a Jaqna. The Namibian government said that the !Kung Traditional Authority was the person responsible for bringing issues before the public. The N≠a Jaqna Conservancy management committee, on the other hand, argued that it had the right to represent the interests of its members. Individual !Kung, !Xun, and Khwe San said that they spoke for themselves and that others did not have the right to speak for them. This is in line with the consensus-based decision-making system of San communities, which often involves lengthy and intense discussions around the campfire (see Wiessner 2014). There were strong sentiments in Tsumkwe District West that when he was the TA, Mr Arnold and a few of his councillors had allegedly engaged in the granting of land in N≠a Jaqna to outsiders, some of them high government officials. The in-migration of people from outside the area had been encouraged by government, which had stated in 2006 that it wanted to establish small-scale resettlement farms in the N≠a Jaqna area that would then be made available to applicants from outside of the area (Hitchcock 2012; Odendaal 2006; Welch 2018). According to some people in N≠a Jaqna, members of the !Kung Traditional Authority allocated rights to land in the conservancy area in exchange for favours and cash. Eventually, legal charges were brought in the High Court of Namibia in 2013 by the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy. On 18 August  2016, the Namibia High Court ruled that several dozen people from outside of the conservancy who had fenced cattle posts in N≠a Jaqna were required to leave the

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

277

area.1 Appeals against the decision were dismissed in October 2016 (Smith 2016c), but as of June 2021 none of the people involved in the legal case had opted to leave the N≠a Jaqna area. After the new !Kung Traditional Authority, Glony Arnold, was crowned at Tsumkwe in 2015, she began to make public statements about the situation regarding the land issues in N≠a Jaqna. She rejected charges by some N≠a Jaqna residents that land in the conservancy had been sold off illegally by her late father, and by some of his traditional authority councillors after Arnold’s death. She had been appointed by the Namibian government even though Ms Arnold herself was thought to have been involved in making illegal land allocations to government officials and others from outside of the N≠a Jaqna area. The invasion of the N≠a Jaqna conservancy continued after the appointment of Ms Arnold in 2015 (Sasman 2016a). Tensions continued to expand over the land allocations and the reactions of the !Kung to the incursions in N≠a Jaqna. At one point, Ms Arnold said that N≠a Jaqna Conservancy management committee was guilty of embezzlement and was “not working in the best interests of the San communities” (Sasman 2016b; Smith 2016b). Members of the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy took strong exception to her statements, saying that the people of N≠a Jaqna were being well-served by the Conservancy and that they received regular benefits from its activities. This was reiterated in The Annual General meeting of the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy held in August of 2020 even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the rhetoric about the N≠a Jaqna legal case heated up, Glony Arnold and some government ministers argued that the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy members had no right to speak on land issues in the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy (Sasman 2016b). Both Ms Arnold and government officials from Windhoek, some of whom had cattle posts in the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy area, argued that many of the people in N≠a Jaqna were immigrants and therefore lacked land rights (Sasman 2016b). While the !Kung were long-term residents of the area, the !Xun and Khwe had been brought to the area in the 1970s and 1980s by the South African Defense Force and the South West African Administration (Sasman 2016b; NJC members, personal communications, 2016). The government, for its part, supported Ms Arnold, in spite of the fact that she herself was suspected of corruption. 1  See High Court of Namibia (2016) for background information on this case, see also Hartman (2016); Hebinck and van der Wulp (2020); Smith (2016a, b, c); Van der Wulp (2016).

278 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

Three of the seven traditional councillors of the !Kung Traditional Authority, Sarah Zungu, Joseph Kaimbi, and Hoffeni Lukas, argued that the !Kung TA should not have a say in what happened with the land in N≠a Jaqna. This was in line with the Communal Land Reform Act of 2002 which does not allow traditional authorities to make land allocation decisions (Republic of Namibia 2002). Glony Arnold, for her part, said that San in Tsumkwe West did not have any rights to the land, nor did they have the right to pursue legal cases. She also said that the ‘resettled people’ should go back to Angola (NJC members, personal communications, 2016), and she accused residents of N≠a Jaqna of trying to oust Oshiwambo-speaking residents from the area, a charge which local people denied. On 18 August 2016, the High Court of Namibia ruled on behalf of the people of N≠a Jaqna and against the outsiders who had entered the conservancy (High Court of Namibia 2016a). Twenty-two of the thirty-five people who had been charged with coming into the conservancy illegally were told that they had to vacate the area. They were given 60 days to remove the fences that had been built. As noted earlier, some of the people who had been illegally granted rights to land in the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy were high government officials. One of them, Teckla Lameck, a former Public Service Commission member, said that she had obtained the land with the blessing of the late chief John Arnold (Tjihenuna 2016). She refused to take down the fences she had had constructed, and she said that the land was ‘legally hers’ though she had no government documents to substantiate that argument. The Minister of Environment and Tourism, Pohamba Shifeta, had claimed publicly that the invasion of the communal conservancies was illegal (Hartman 2016). She visited the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy in September 2016 and repeated her arguments that the outsiders who had brought their cattle and other stock into the area were there breaking the law. It should be stressed that both government officials and members of the public in Namibia tend to see traditional authorities as having broader rights than they actually do. As illustrated by the aforementioned account, this view is also true for some of the traditional authorities themselves. The Traditional Authorities Act of 2000 (Republic of Namibia 2000) and the Communal Lands Reform Act of 2002 (Republic of Namibia 2002) both state specifically that traditional authorities do not have the power to allocate land or to grant de jure (legal) status to land held by individuals. They can advise on the management of land and natural resources, but they are

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

279

not allocation authorities. This power lies with the Regional Administrator and the Regional Communal Land Boards (CLBs). Traditional authorities can give advice to the Communal Land Boards based on their experience and knowledge and that of their advisors, but ultimately it is up to the Communal Land Boards and the state to allocate land. All communal land in Namibia belongs to the nation-state (Republic of Namibia 2002, Section 17), and is held in trust for the benefit of the traditional communities occupying those areas. Some would argue that the office of traditional authority was created from the top down as a means of facilitating Namibian government political control post-independence—even though the Namibian government maintains that traditional authorities are actually selected by the people, not by the government. One of the most contentious issues involving Namibian traditional authorities relates to the land issue, particularly given that there are cases where TAs have granted land rights to individuals, sometimes in exchange for favours or cash payments, as occurred in N≠a Jaqna. In Namibian communal areas, land cannot be bought and sold; rather, it belongs to the people of that area as a group (though ultimately owned by the state). Land also cannot be fenced unless permission is obtained from the Regional Communal Land Board, the Regional Administration, or the government’s Ministry of Lands and Resettlement (MLR). People in N≠a Jaqna have said that the fences that have been constructed have reduced their ability to collect wild plants and resulted in a loss of wild migratory animals, some of which have declined in number in the past two decades. The reduction in wild animals has led to a decline in the annual benefits from the safari hunting company operating in N≠a Jaqna, which has, in turn, affected annual household incomes—which was the case in 2015–2020. There were no indications that any of the people who had come into the N≠a Jaqna area and erected fences in recent years were preparing to leave, in spite of the High Court’s decision. Neither the !Kung Traditional authority nor the Namibian Police were taking steps to force the illegal immigrants to leave the area. The !Kung Traditional Authority was reported to have said that “I and I alone have a say in the manner in which land is dished out in the conservancy area” (Sasman 2016b, p. 2). There were also differences of opinion among the councillors in the !Kung Traditional Authority about how to handle the land issue. According to members of the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy, none of the procedures for land

280 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

allocation outlined by the Namibian government were being followed in N≠a Jaqna. The result, they said, was a ‘land rush’ which was leading to local San being dispossessed and prevented from gaining access to resources such as grazing and wild plant foods that they needed to survive. The expansion in the numbers of cattle and goats in the area, they said, was having negative impacts on their livelihoods. As one man from Omatako, Amon Petrus, put it, “What we want is to choose our own chief. The chief and those councilors selling off land illegally must go. We want leaders who can work with the community” (Sasman 2016b, p. 2). This wish has not been met.

3   Challenges to TA Authority and Communities in Nyae Nyae The Nyae Nyae area, overseen by Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority Tsamkxao ≠Oma, has also been the scene of invasions by people from outside of the area along with their cattle. In April 2009, approximately 100 Herero from the/Gam area to the south of Nyae Nyae cut the Redline Veterinary Cordon Fence, brought in over 1200 cattle, and proceeded to establish small cattle posts while living in Tsumkwe. The Namibian Police, with the support of the government and the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority, confiscated the cattle belonging to the illegal immigrants, some of which were later returned to their owners (Hays and Hitchcock 2020). In July, 2015, after careful investigations involving the use of global positioning systems (GPS) instruments and the application of geographic information systems (GIS) and ground surveys (see Begbie-Clench 2015), a legal case was filed against four illegal grazers in Tsumkwe (Hays and Hitchcock 2020; Hitchcock 2015; Sasman 2015). The Nyae Nyae Conservancy and the Nyae Nyae Community Forest (NNCF) management committee, along with consultants, documented illegal activities using GPS instruments, cellular telephones, cameras, and aerial and ground mapping for use as evidence in lawsuits that are currently in the High Court of Namibia. The Nyae Nyae case has yet to be ruled upon, but with the precedent of the N≠a Jaqna case of 18 August 2016 (Hebinck and van der Wulp 2020; High Court of Namibia 2016a) it is likely that the people of Nyae Nyae could prevail in their case against the illegal grazers. The question remains whether the government will enforce the judgement.

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

281

It should be emphasized that the Nyae Nyae case is not being brought by the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority but rather by the Nyae Nyae Community Forest Management Committee, which has standing under Namibian law (Hazam 2017). The traditional authority as an institution did not have the right to make a land claim under the Communal Land Reform Act (Republic of Namibia 2002). The Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority and its councillors do support the action of the Legal Assistance Center and the Nyae Nyae Community Forest Management Committee. One of the problems faced by the people of Nyae Nyae was that the people who have been characterized as illegal immigrants have been aggressive in their claims to Nyae Nyae. They have argued that Nyae Nyae was occupied traditionally by the Herero as well as the Ju/’hoansi, and that the government and the High Court should treat both groups as historically disadvantaged communities with equal rights to land and resources. The dispute between the Ju/’hoansi and the Herero is complicated for the Government of Namibia, which does not want to be seen as favouring one group over the other. Complaints from Ju/’hoansi in Nyae Nyae range from cattle getting into their fields and gardens to a reduction of wild plant resources around Tsumkwe, which is the centre of occupancy of the pastoralists. In June 2019, the mayor of Tsumkwe Municipality said that there were no laws that prevented occupancy of the town by people from other parts of the country along with their herds. Here the mayor was referring to the Tsumkwe Municipality itself, not the rest of the area. Both Ju/’hoansi and Herero said in interviews in June 2019 that they were hopeful that the conclusions of the Second National Land Conference of 1–15 October 2018 and the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry into Claims on Ancestral Land Rights and Restitution would resolve some of the land issues, The Ancestral Land Claims  report was submitted to President Geingob on 24 July 2020 (see Republic of Namibia 2020). The report was actually made available to the public in late January 2021. Ju/’hoan San in Nyae Nyae hoped that this report would lead to a clarification of land rights issues and settlement of disputes over land in Nyae Nyae, which had been a serious problem since 2009 (Biesele and Hitchcock 2013, p. xix, pp. 223–224). The Ju/’hoansi, for their part, said that they hoped that the High Court would rule positively on their legal claim against the illegal grazers in Nyae Nyae, which had been postponed in November 2020 to sometime in 2021. Some of the Herero living in Tsumkwe said that they were hoping that the Ju/’hoan Traditional

282 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

Authority, the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, and the Nyae Nyae Community Forest would ‘see the light’ and withdraw the legal case. Two Herero also claimed that the relationships between the Herero and Ju/’hoansi were symbiotic in nature, that these relationships were important to both communities, and that they could live together peacefully in Nyae Nyae. Government, for its part, appeared reluctant to make a choice between the two historically disadvantaged communities.

4   Conclusion A comparison of the two San conservancies in Tsumkwe District and their relations with their traditional authorities shows the complexities in the ways that traditional authorities operate vis a vis their constituents. Data on the !Kung Traditional Authority and the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy and the Ju/’hoansi Traditional Authority and the Nyae Nyae Conservancy are summarized in Table 2. It can be seen that the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy has far more people than does Nyae Nyae. At the same time, the two conservancies are roughly the same size in area. There are many more illegal grazers in N≠a Jaqna than in Nyae Nyae. Tensions between the traditional authorities and community members are much greater in N≠a Jaqna than is the case in Nyae Nyae. Part of the reason for this situation is that the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority has been in place since 1998, whereas in N≠a Jaqna, a disruption occurred as the result of the death of the !Kung Traditional Authority, John Arnold, in 2012 and the appointment of a new !Kung TA, Glony Arnold, in 2015. The people of N≠a Jaqna argued that they wanted to have a greater say in the decision about the appointment of the new chief, and that they were uncomfortable with the government’s appointment of a relative of the previous chief as the !Kung Traditional Authority. Many of the residents of N≠a Jaqna were also uncomfortable with the fact that Glony Arnold had not been elected but had been appointed by the government against the wishes of the people of N≠a Jaqna. At the heart of this study, which began in 2001 and continued through 2019, we assessed the effects of the formalization of San leadership through the Traditional Authorities Act of 2000 and the rights and responsibilities of the TAs under the Communal Land Reform Act of 2002. We considered the implications of this process in terms of legitimacy and representation in land conflicts and community decision-­making. From a theoretical standpoint, the complex processes of allocating,

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

283

Table 2  Comparison of governance and land resource management strategies in two Tsumkwe district conservancies, N≠a Jaqna and Nyae Nyae Tsumkwe District West, N≠a Jaqna Conservancy

Tsumkwe District East, Nyae Nyae Conservancy

!Kung Traditional Authority (KTA), Glony Arnold, March 2015 N≠a Jaqna Conservancy (2000 members) 9120 km2 in size, 25 villages, 7000 people Date of establishment: July, 2003 Governance: N≠a Jaqna Conservancy (NJC) Management Committee Capital: Omatako Ethnic groups:!Kung,!Xun, Khwe, Hai// om, and Ju/’hoansi San, Kavango, Herero M’Kata Community Forest (gazetted 5 June 2006), N≠a Jaqna Community Forest, 2018 Otjozondjupa Regional Administration and Otjozondjupa Communal Land Board Resource management by N≠a Jaqna Conservancy members at the village level and traditional leaders and managers High Court of Namibia (2016a) Case No. A: 276/2013, In the High Court of Namibia, Main Division, Windhoek, Thursday, 18 August, 2016 in the matter between the N/a Jaqna Conservancy Committee, Applicant and Minister of Lands and Resettlement and 35 Others, Respondents. Windhoek: High Court of Namibia.

Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority (JUTA) Tsamkxao ≠Oma, July 1998 Nyae Nyae Conservancy (1350 members) 8992 km2 in size 36 villages, 2700 people Date of Establishment: February, 1998 Governance: Nyae Nyae Conservancy (NJC) Management Committee Capital: Tsumkwe Ethnic groups: Ju/’hoansi San, Herero, Kavango, Ovambo Nyae Nyae Community Forest (gazetted June 2013)

Tensions exist between the!Kung Traditional Authority and the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy and its members over land allocations by the KTA

Otjozondjupa Regional Administration and Otjozondjupa Communal Land Board Resource management by Nyae Nyae Conservancy members and local n!ore kxaosi (Ju/’hoan territorial overseers) High Court of Namibia (2016b) Case Number HC-MD-CIV-MOTGEN-­2018/0093 in the matter between Chief Tsamkxao #Oma, Ju/’hoasi Traditional Authority, Board and Management Committee of the Nyae Nyae Communal Conservancy, the Board and Management Committee of the Nyae Nyae Community Forest, and Minister of Land Reform, et al. Windhoek: High Court of Namibia. Good cooperation between the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority (JUTA) and the Nyae Nyae Conservancy and its members

Note: Data obtained from the N≠a Jaqna and Nyae Nyae Conservancy management committees, the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia, and fieldwork

claiming, challenging, and negotiating authority shed light on the question of the importance of democratic elections versus top-down traditional leader appointments. There is clearly a conflict in Namibia between community concepts of authority and governmental ones. Some traditional

284 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

authorities, as seen in the case of the !Kung Traditional Authority in N≠a Jaqna, appear to operate with more self-interest than do some of the democratically elected traditional authorities such as the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority, Tsamkxao ≠Oma, who demonstrated repeatedly his willingness to stand up for his community and work hard on their behalf. The impacts of government-appointed and locally elected leaders, diversified land use systems, and social and legal struggles over resources were examined, and we concluded that there continue to be major disagreements between the Namibian government, traditional authorities, and members of San and other communal conservancies about who represents whom, who speaks for whom, and what rights individuals have relative to representing themselves in issues of land, leadership, and natural resource management. As is the case in South Africa (see James 2007; Kelly 2012; Republic of South Africa 2019), traditional leaders in Namibia continue to play complex roles in the political and land allocation and management process. One of the real measures of success of conservancies in the communal areas of Namibia is having the support of the traditional authorities. Traditional authorities have the power to either facilitate or to complicate things considerably, as they have, for example, through the provision or withholding of support for development projects or the allocation of land and resources to groups and individuals without community permission. Again, this is a conflict between community conceptions of authority and governmental ones. Most San want the people who represent them to operate like the k’xau n!asi did in the past—not acting like formal leaders seeking political power, but rather working with community members in a participatory way to reach decisions that are acceptable to the community as a whole. Political leaders can be described as individuals who have a disproportionate level of influence and decision-making power within their communities (Garfield et al. 2019a, b). San communities want their newly institutionalized leaders to behave equitably and to seek to ensure transparency, accountability, broad-based participation, social justice, and fairness. They do not want to see traditional authorities acting with impunity while government fails to take steps to remove those traditional authorities who abuse their office and operate against community wishes. As Wyckoff Baird (1996, 2000), Thoma and Piek (1997), and Anaya (2013) note, the Ju/’hoansi and other San favour democracy and democratic systems of

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

285

decision-making. As one member of the N≠a Jaqna conservancy said, “This is not about gender, it is about how a leader uses power.” At the 22nd annual meeting of the Council of Traditional Leaders, held from 19 to 23 August 2019, the President of Namibia, Hage Geingob, said that traditional authorities burden the government (Kahiurka 2019). He argued that accommodating more applications for recognition of traditional authorities was financially unsustainable, and he said that the process could lead to further divisions among groups. A problem that the president recognizes in the traditional authority system in Namibia is that some TAs have entered politics and thus have the power to influence decisions not only at the community level but also at the national level. As Keulder (2000, p.  163) notes, however, a substantial number of traditional authorities lack the capacity to enforce decisions and customary law rulings. There are clearly shortcomings in the Traditional Authorities Act of 2000 and the Communal Land Reform Act of 2002 which need to be addressed. The acts take the hierarchical system of the Ovambo as the primary model for traditional authorities, which does not apply easily to groups such as the San. As seen in the case of the !Kung Traditional Authority, having a ‘royal house’ approach to the designation of traditional authorities can lead to problems. The Namibian traditional authorities are accountable to the Ministry of Regional and Local Government, Housing, and Rural Development (MRLGHRD). The Communal Land Boards are now (as of March 2020) accountable to  the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform. While the traditional authorities do work with the communal land boards, there is no legal obligation for TAs to consult directly with their constituents on such sensitive topics as land alienation (Werner 2018, p. 21). The Communal Land Reform Act provides no guidance on how to address disputes in an equitable, socially just, and fair manner. It is important to clarify the roles of traditional authorities and to make them more responsive to the people whom they represent. Ensuring a democratic electoral process for Namibian traditional authorities without government or political party interference will go a long way towards resolving many of the difficult conflicts that exist in communal areas of the country, including Nyae Nyae and N≠a Jaqna. Acknowledgements  Support of the research upon which this chapter is based was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (grant BCS 1122932), Brot für

286 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

die Welt (Project No. 2013 0148), the Millennium Challenge Account-Namibia (grant MCC-08-011-1AA-94), and the U.S.  Department of State (grant SWA80018GR0028). We wish to thank the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia, the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy, the Ju/’hoan Traditional Authority, the !Kung Traditional Authority, the Division of Marginalized Communities (DMC) in the Office of the President, and the Legal Assistance Center for the assistance that they provided. We also acknowledge the many contributions of Tsamkxao ≠Oma, Leon Tsamkxao, Kallie Nannie, Xoan// an Xoois, Steve/Kunta, Sarah Zungu, Gabriel Hipandulwa, Kahepako Kakujaha, James Anaya, Ben Begbie-Clench, Magdalena Broermann, Dave Cole, Loretta Fitzpatrick, Jennifer Hays, John Hazam, Manfred Hinz, Cecelia Isaacs, Melinda Kelly, Stasja Koot, Willem Odendaal, Claire Ritchie, Elke Matthai, Maria Sapignoli, Axel Thoma, Wendy Viall, Polly Wiessner, and Wolfgang Werner. Sabine Klocke-­ Daffa and Arne S. Steinforth provided superb editorial comments and insights. We also appreciate the suggestions of an anonymous reviewer. Finally, we thank the people of Nyae Nyae and N≠a Jaqna for all the information which they provided us so willingly.

References Anaya, S. James (2013). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya. The Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Namibia. Human Rights Council, 24th Session, Annex 3. A/HRC/24/47. Geneva: Human Rights Council. Baldwin, Kate (2015). The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Begbie-Clench, Benjamin (2015). Illegal Grazing in Nyae Nyae Conservancy: Assessment and Recommendations. Windhoek: Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia and Legal Assistance Centre. Biesele, Megan / Hitchcock, Robert K. (2013). The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Boden, Gertrud. (2020). Land and Resource Rights of the Khwe in Bwabwata National Park. In Odendaal, Willem / Werner, Wolfgang (Eds.) Neither Here nor There: Indigeneity, Marginalisation, and Land Rights in Post-Independence Namibia. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Centre, pp. 229–254. Buthelezi, Mbongiseni / Skosana, Dineo / Vale, Beth (Eds.) (2019). Traditional Leaders in a Democracy: Resources, Respect, and Resistance. Johannesburg: Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA). Chigudu, Daniel (2015). Assessing Policy Initiatives on Traditional Leadership to Promote Electoral Democracy in Southern Africa. In: Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6 (1), pp. 120–126.

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

287

Chlouba, Vladimir (2019). Traditional Authority and State Legitimacy: Evidence from Namibia. East Lansing and Legon-Accra: Afrobarometer. d’Engelbronner, Franka M. / Hinz, Manfred O. / Sindano, J. L. (Eds.) (1998). Traditional Authority and Democracy in Southern Africa. Windhoek: New Namibia Books. Division of Marginalized Communities (2018a). Draft White Paper on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Namibia. Windhoek: Division of Marginalized Communities, Office of the Vice President. Division of Marginalized Communities (2018b). Celebrating the Rights of Marginalised Communities in Namibia. Windhoek: Division of Marginalized Communities, Office of the President. Garfield, Zachary H. / Hubbard, Robert L. / Hagen, Edward H. (2019a). Evolutionary Models of Leadership. In: Human Nature, 30, pp. 23–58. Garfield, Zachary H. / von Rueden, Christopher / Hagen, Edward C. (2019b). The Evolutionary Anthropology of Political Leadership. In: The Leadership Quarterly, 30, pp. 59–80. Gargallo, Eduard (2020). Community Conservation and Land Use in Namibia: Visions, Expectations and Realities. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 46 (1), pp. 29–147. Gewald, Jan-Bart (1999). Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia. Oxford: James Currey. Government of the Republic of Namibia (1991). Report by the Commission of Inquiry into Matters Relating to Chiefs, Headmen and Other Traditional or Tribal Chiefs. Windhoek: Office of the Prime Minister. Hartman, Adam (2016). Namibia: Shifeta Condemns Invasion of Conservancies. In: The Namibian (9 August 2016). Hays, Jennifer / Hitchcock, Robert K. (2020). Land and Resource Rights in the Tsumkwe Conservancies – Nyae Nyae and N≠a Jaqna. In Odendaal, Willem / Werner, Wolfgang (Eds.), Neither Here nor There: Indigeneity, Marginalisation, and Land Rights in Post-Independence Namibia. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Center. pp. 183–214. Hays, Jennifer / Thiem, Maarit / Jones, Brian T. B. (2014). Otjozondjupa Region. In: Dieckmann, Ute / Thiem, Maarit / Dirkx, Erik / Hays, Jennifer (Eds.) Scraping the Pot: San in Namibia Two Decades after Independence. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Centre and Desert Research Foundation of Namibia, pp. 93–172. Hazam, John (2017). Conservancies, Community Forests, and Land Issues from a Legal Perspective: Constraints and Opportunities. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Centre. Hebinck, Paul / van der Wulp, Christa (2020). Fighting Fences: The Legal Battle for Negotiating the Cattle-Conservation Nexus in Namibia. African Affairs.

288 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

High Court of Namibia (2016a). Case No. A: 276/2013, In the High Court of Namibia, Main Division, Windhoek, Thursday, 18 August, 2016 in the matter between the N/a Jaqna Conservancy Committee, Applicant and Minister of Lands and Resettlement and 35 Others, Respondents. Windhoek: High Court of Namibia. High Court of Namibia (2016b). Case Number HC-MD-CIV-MOTGEN-­2018/0093  in the matter between Chief Tsamkxao #Oma, Ju/’hoasi Traditional Authority, Board and Management Committee of the Nyae Nyae Communal Conservancy, the Board and Management Committee of the Nyae Nyae Community Forest, and Minister of Land Reform, et al. Windhoek: High Court of Namibia. Hinz, Manfred O. / Gairiseb, Alex (Eds.) (2016). Customary Law Ascertained: Volume 3: The Customary Law of the Nama, Ovaherero, Ovambanderu, and San Communities of Namibia. Windhoek: University of Namibia (UNAM) Press. Hinz, Manfred O. / Gairiseb, Alex (Eds.) (2013). Customary Law Ascertained: Volume 2: The Customary Law of the Bakgalagari, Batswana, and Damara Communities of Namibia. Windhoek: University of Namibia (UNAM) Press. Hinz, Manfred O. / Namwonde, Ndateelela E. (Eds.) (2010). Customary Law Ascertained: Volume 1: The Customary Law of the Owambo, Kavango, and Caprivi Communities of Namibia. Windhoek: Kuiseb Publishers/Namibia Scientific Society. Hinz, Manfred O. (2008) Traditional Governance and African Customary Law: Comparative Observations from a Namibia Perspective. In: Horn, N. / Bosi, A. (Eds.). Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Namibia. Windhoek: Macmillan Namibia, pp. 59–87. Hinz, Manfred O. / Patemann, Helgard K. (Eds.) (2006). The Shade of New Leaves: Governance in Traditional Authority: A Southern African Perspective. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Hinz, Manfred O. (2004). Without Chiefs There Would Be No Game: Customary Law and Nature Conservation. Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers. Hinz, Manfred O. / Joas, Santos (1995). Customary Law in Namibia: Development and Perspective. Windhoek: Center for Applied Social Sciences, University of Namibia. Hitchcock, Robert K. (2015). Improving the Viability and Sustainability of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy and the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy: A Mid-Term Evaluation of an NNDFN/Brot für die Welt Project in Namibia. Windhoek: Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia. Hitchcock, Robert K. (2012). Refugees, Resettlement, and Land and Resource Conflicts: The Politics of Identity among !Xun and Khwe San of Northeastern Namibia. In: African Study Monographs, 33 (2), pp. 73–132.

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

289

Hitchcock, Robert K. (2001). Anthropological Study in the Potential Impact of Refugees in M’Kata, Namibia. Windhoek: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Hohmann, Thekla (2003). We Are Looking for Life. We Are Looking for the Conservancy. Namibian Conservancies, Nature Conservation, and Rural Development: The N/a Jaqna Conservancy. In: Hohmann, Thekla (Ed.), San and the State, Contesting Land, Development, Identity, and Representation. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, pp. 205–223. Holm, John D. / Botlhale, Emanuel (2008). Persistence and Decline of Traditional Authority in Modern Botswana Politics. In: Botswana Notes and Records, 40, pp. 74–87. James, Deborah (2007). Gaining Ground: ‘Rights’ and Property in South African Land Reform. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Kahiurka, Ndanki (2019). Namibia: Traditional Authorities Burden Government. In: The Namibian (20 August 2019). Kelly, Jill E. (2012). Only the Fourth Chief: Conflict, Land, and Chiefly Authority in Kwazulu-Natal, 1973–1994. Ph.D.  Dissertation, History, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. Keulder, Christiaan (2000). Traditional Leaders. In: Keulder, Christiaan (Ed.). State, Society, and Democracy: A Reader in Namibian Politics. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan, pp. 150–170. Keulder, Christiaan (1998). Traditional Leaders and Local Government in Africa: Lessons in Africa. Pretoria: HRSC Publishers. Keulder, Christiaan (1997). Traditional Leaders and Comparative Experiences in Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. In: De Villers, B. (Ed.) The Rights of Indigenous People: A Quest for Coexistence. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), pp. 168–192. Logan, C. (2008). Traditional Leaders in Modern Africa: Can Democracy and the Chief Co-Exist? East Lansing: Michigan State University. Malan, J.S. (1995). Peoples of Namibia. Wingate Park: Rhino Publishers. Marshall, John (2003). A Kalahari Family. (Film). Watertown: Documentary Educational Resources. Marshall, Lorna (1999). Nyae Nyae !Kung: Beliefs and Rites. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Monographs. Marshall, Lorna (1976). The !Kung of Nyae Nyae. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marshall, Lorna (1960). !Kung Bushman Bands. In: Africa, 30 (4), pp. 325–355. Naidoo, Robin / Weaver, Chris L. / Diggle, Richard W. / Greenwell, Matongo / Stuart-Hill, Greg / Thouless, Chris (2016). Complementary Benefits of Tourism and Hunting to Communal Conservancies in Namibia. In: Conservation Biology, 30 (3), pp. 628–638.

290 

R. K. HITCHCOCK ET AL.

Namibian Association of CBNRM Support Organisations, NASCO, www.nasco. org.na/conservancies, accessed 2 June 2020. Nampa (2015a). !Kung San Deplore Biased Intervention. In: The Namibian (5 March 2015). Nampa (2015b). New !Kung San Chief Crowned at Tsumkwe. In: The Namibian (29 March 2015). N≠a Jaqna Conservancy Management Committee (2016) personal communication to the authors. Mangetti Dune, Namibia N≠a Jaqna Conservancy (NJC) Management Committee. Odendaal, Willem (2006). San Communal Lands Contested: The Battle over N/a Jaqna Conservancy. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Center. Oomen, Barbara (2005). Chiefs in South Africa: Law, Power and Culture in the Post-Apartheid Era. Oxford: James Curry. Republic of Namibia (2020). Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Claims of Ancestral Land Rights and Restitution: Windhoek: Government of the Republic of Namibia. Republic of Namibia (2002). Communal Land Reform Act 2002. No. 5 of 2002. Windhoek: Government of the Republic of Namibia. Republic of Namibia (2000). Traditional Authorities Act of 2000 (No. 25 of 2000). Windhoek: Government of the Republic of Namibia. Republic of Namibia (1997). Council of Traditional Leaders Act (No. 13 of 1997). Windhoek: Government of the Republic of Namibia. Republic of Namibia (1996). Nature Conservation Amendment Act of 1996. Windhoek: Government of the Republic of Namibia. Republic of Namibia (1995). Traditional Authorities Act. Windhoek: Government of the Republic of Namibia. Republic of South Africa (2019). Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act. Act No. 3 of 2019. In: Government Gazette 653, (42865). Cape Town and Pretoria: Government of the Republic of South Africa. Ritchie, Claire (1987). /Toma: A Tribute. In: Cultural Survival Quarterly 12 (3), pp. 36–37. Sasman, Catherine (2016a). Illegal Invasion in N≠a Jaqna Continues. In: Namibian Sun (3 October 2016). Sasman, Catherine (2016b). Angolan San Must Get Out. In: Namibian Sun (20 October 2016). Sasman, Catherine (2015). Garden of Eden in Peril. In: Namibian Sun (4 September 2015). Schapera, Isaac (1970). Tribal Innovators: Tswana Chiefs and Social Change 1795–1940. London: Athlone Press. Schapera, Isaac (1938). A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. London: Frank Cass.

  SAN TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES 

291

Smith, Jana-Mari (2016a). Court Victory for the San. In: Namibian Sun (19 September 2016). Smith, Jana-Mari (2016b). No Appeals Lodged in Conservancy Judgement. In: New Era (18 October 2016). Smith, Jana-Mari (2016c). Ten Appeal Court N≠a Jaqna Judgment. In: Namibian Sun (21 October 2016). Thoma, Axel / Piek, Janine (1997). Customary Law and Traditional Authority of the San. Windhoek: Center for Applied Social Sciences, University of Namibia. Tjihenuna, Theresa (2016). Lameck Denies Illegal Occupation of Land. In: The Namibian (15 September 2016). Vail, Leroy (Ed.) (1989). The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. London: James Currey. Van der Wulp, Christa (2016). Transformation of Communal Lands: Illegal Fences in the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy. M.A.  Thesis, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands. Welch, Cameron (2018). Land is Life, Conservancy is Life: The San and the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy, Tsumkwe District West, Namibia. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Werner, Wolfgang (2020). Land, Resources and Governance Conflicts in Kunene Region involving Conservancies. In: Odendaal, Willem / Werner, Wolfgang (Eds.). Neither Here nor There: Indigeneity, Marginalisation, and Land Rights in Post-Independence Namibia. Windhoek: Legal Assistance Center, pp. 255–282. Werner, Wolfgang (2018). Land Tenure and Governance on Communal Land in Namibia. Paper presented at the Second National Land Conference, Windhoek (1–5 October 2018). Wiessner, Polly W. (2014). Embers of Society: Firelight Talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111 (39), pp. 14027–14035. Wyckoff-Baird, Barbara (2000). Environmental Governance: Lessons from the Ju/’hoan Bushmen in Northeastern Namibia. In: Weber, Ron / Butler, John / Larson, Patty (Eds.), Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations: Experiences in Collaboration, Washington, DC: Biodiversity Support Program, pp. 113–135. Wyckoff-Baird, Barbara (1996). Democracy: Indicators from Ju/’hoan Bushmen in Namibia. In: Cultural Survival Quarterly, 20 (2), pp. 18–21.

Sacred Spaces, Legal Claims: Competing Claims for Legitimate Knowledge and Authority over the Use of Land in Nharira Hills, Zimbabwe Shannon Morreira and Fiona Iliff

1   Introduction In 2018, a group of people who self-identified as members of the Nyamweda clan approached Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) following an eviction of members of their community from their place of residence near Nharira Hills, Zimbabwe, approximately 20 kilometres west of the capital city Harare. Recognised by the National Museums and Monuments Act as a heritage site, Nharira Hills is a place of rain-petitioning rituals and other sacred activities, and the group

S. Morreira (*) University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] F. Iliff Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Harare, Zimbabwe © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_11

293

294 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

historically had access to the interconnected hills in the wider area for the regular performance of rituals (we speak more to the complicated ways in which such access was negotiated over time by different groups and in different contexts). The group had moved onto Somerby Farm to act as traditional1 custodians of the sacred sites including ‘Somerby Caves’ which have also been gazetted as a national monument. The Nyamweda community hold a wide area outside of the ‘Nharira Hills’ heritage site to be their ancestral lands of Nharira, on which their ceremonies are conducted. However, private companies and individuals have now been given access to the area by the state, primarily with an aim towards granite mining and developing quarries for cement. In this chapter, we consider the competing claims to authority and their relationship to ways of knowing at play at Nharira. We examine the conflicts and confluences between kinds of knowledge, to speak to the varied forms of authority at work in contemporary postcolonial Zimbabwe. The question we have been guided by throughout is one on the very real effects of knowledge politics: what can the current situation at Nharira tell us about the relationship between the multiple ways of knowing at play in contemporary Zimbabwe, and the ways in which power, authority, tradition, and legitimacy are made and un-made in contestations over knowledge about the use of land? What might this interplay tell us about the ways in which people can claim moral legitimacy, even without holding political power? In the first section of the chapter, we provide a brief overview of Zimbabwe. We move from here to our theoretical framing, in which we 1  A note on terminology: we recognise that ‘tradition’ is part and parcel of modernity. Where we use the word ‘traditional’ in this chapter, we do so from the perspective of rights discourse in Zimbabwe, in which tradition is used to give credence to the historical and ancestral connections people have to particular spaces and ways of life, particularly where they clash with other ways of being and doing, and other claims to land. We thus recognise tradition as an idiom which allows us insight into the ways in which power over and knowledge about the social world is made and un-made, over time (see the Introduction to this volume). Although invoked as timeless, tradition is fluid and often relatively new. Where necessary, we have also used the term ‘indigenous’, as it has recently emerged in Zimbabwean political and legal discourse. However, the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act defines an indigenous Zimbabwean as “any person who before the 18th of April 1980 was disadvantaged by unfair discrimination on the grounds of his or her race, and any descendant of such a person”. Given that this definition is broad, in places like Nharira other ways must be found to lay claim to a particular space: recourse to tradition and heritage is one means by which this is done.

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

295

bring together political anthropological work on power, knowledge, and authority, with decolonial thought on the geopolitics of ­ knowledge/ power, in order to describe what we call epistemic pluralism: the strategic use of different epistemological frameworks at different moments by inhabitants of the postcolony. Next, we present a detailed case study of how land and landscape has been used and understood in Nharira historically and into the present, before returning to our theoretical tools to unpack the example through the lenses of competing forms of authority and ways of knowing land. The work we present here is the outcome of collaborative research between a human rights lawyer (F.I.) and an anthropologist (S.M.). The information on the varied usages and understandings of landscape at Nharira that we present here was gathered through a combination of archival work and interviews with various stakeholders.

2   Theoretical Framing Struggles over ways of knowing, and what sorts of knowledge are deemed accurate, operationalisable, and legitimate, have lain at the heart of struggles for authority in colonial and postcolonial Africa. In social science, the entanglements between power, knowledge, and legitimacy were popularised through the work of Michel Foucault (1980, 1979). More recently, decolonial thinking from the Global South has deepened the power/ knowledge theorisation by bringing it within a world-system theory that recognises the ways in which power/knowledge has played out over time and space through colonialism and into the present, such that European-­ originating categories of thought and persons have been legitimised and considered valid and powerful, while others have not (Mignolo 2011). One of the core acts of the imposition of modernity through colonialism was thus to posit only one way of knowing as accurate/truthful, and other knowledge systems as anthropologically interesting, but not epistemologically or ontologically sound (Mignolo 2011). In this chapter, we thus begin from the premise that it is impossible to understand the dynamics of authority in Africa without understanding the ways in which different knowledge systems have been valued over time and the effects of this in the present. We begin from a core working definition of authority as legitimated power, but also recognise that in colonial settings, power is differently legitimated in different epistemological spaces. For example, institutional forms of power such as the role played

296 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

by ancestors in structuring society was recognised as legitimate in indigenous knowledge systems, but was seen as illegitimate by the colonial state. Power and knowledge are entangled, and knowledge is not neutral (Foucault 1979). Furthermore, while the temporal period of colonialism as a moment of political oppression may have passed, the longer epistemological effects of coloniality—the continued valuing of ideas of modernity, development, and extractive notions of economic success which devalue other ways of being and other forms of life on the planet—continue into the present (Mignolo 2011). Furthermore, originally colonial terms such as ‘tradition’, have become part of local discursive discourses, and, as such, can tell us something about local ways of thinking about continuity and change, in that ‘traditions’ are fluid and often relatively new, even where they are given imagined historical heft and authoritative status. To say that one way of knowing the world has been dominant, therefore, is not to say that other ways of knowing have been entirely silenced or removed. Instead, we argue that the knowledge politics at play in the contemporary postcolony show a great deal of epistemic plurality, or multiple ways of knowing, to be present. In analysing globalisation, Tsing (2005) uses the term friction to describe the “heterogeneous and unequal encounters” (Tsing 2005, p. 264) that arise when such different ways of knowing and being meet one another. Land is one place in which such contestations play out, and in this chapter we examine the frictional encounters that occur at Nharira in contestations over making authority: that is to say, contestations over what constitutes legitimate knowledge over uses of space, and through that, whose power is legitimised and for what purposes. It is worth noting that although we speak of a plurality of ways of knowing, we are not operating in terms of binaries such that we view some knowledge as traditional, and some as modern, or, worse, view some knowers as traditional and other knowers as modern. Rather, we recognise tradition as fluid and continuously re-invented, such that modernity is a space in which multiple ways of knowing are present simultaneously, in which the same social actors may draw on different knowledge systems at different moments (some of which are spoken of through the idiom of tradition). In this instance, at Nharira Hills, such multiple ways of knowing are being used as a strategic means of consolidating power over land. Post-apartheid cultural theorist Sarah Nuttall (2009) uses the idea of entanglement to write from the Global South against the binaries that have allowed for the postcolony to be narrated through difference rather

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

297

than intricacy and overlap. She defines entanglement as “a condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with; it speaks of an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, ignored, or uninvited. It is a term which may gesture towards a relationship or set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies a human foldedness” (Nuttall 2009, p. 1). Morreira (2016) has considered the ways in which entangled knowledge systems have been drawn on in Zimbabwe with regard to justice (Morreira 2016, pp.  57–88); here we extend the analysis to land.

3   Background: Power and Its Practice in Zimbabwe In Zimbabwe, the past matters. Multiple histories are enfolded into the land. For starters, the Southern African country is the only one in the world to be named after an archaeological site, Great Zimbabwe (Nhamo and Katsamudanga 2015, p. 311). In this background section, we consider the histories of governance as they affect and effect relations to land. Colonisation in the Southern African interior is not that far in the past: the first ‘pioneer column’, sent by Cecil John Rhodes under the protection of the British South African Police, would have passed by Nharira in the 1890s. Salisbury (now Harare) became the capital city of Southern Rhodesia just shy of a hundred years ago in the 1920s. In the colonial era, the country was initially a British colony, Southern Rhodesia. Southern Rhodesia issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain under Prime Minister Ian Smith in 1965, and became an independent state, albeit one still under white settler leadership and without majority rule. Rhodesia existed in this form for a further fifteen years. Zimbabwe thus reached full independence and majority rule comparatively late in 1980, after a protracted and bloody independence struggle: the Second Chimurenga (the first being an unsuccessful uprising against the British South African Company upon its arrival in the late 1800s)2 (Morreira 2016, pp. 5–9). In 1980, only 40 years ago, this temporal colonial period of political and economic oppression ended: but the effects of 2  The ChiShona term ‘Chimurenga’ is used in Zimbabwe to refer to struggles for liberation. The first Chimurenga constituted a largely unsuccessful uprising by both Shona and Zimbabwean people against the British South Africa Company in the 1890s; the Second Chimurenga refers to the liberation war in the 1970s. In the present day, the Fast Track Land Reform Process as discussed later is at times called the Third Chimurenga.

298 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

modernity, and of forms of violent governance, have continued into, and in some instances deepened, in the present. Postcolonial Zimbabwe began with global and local optimism: historian Brian Raftopoulos (2004, p. 4) has referred to the 1980s in Zimbabwe as “the years of restoration and hope”, in which a postcolonial nation-building project emerged. Even in the heyday of nation-building, however, fractures were obvious: the province of Matabeleland, for example, experienced the first incidences of postcolonial violence during the Gukurahundi massacres, a state-based systematic programme of violence against the Ndebele population, ostensibly in response to the actions of dissidents, but in reality an operation that targeted civilians and ex-soldiers alike. State-sponsored violence as a means of asserting and consolidating political power has been a continual trend from the 1980s onward (Sachikonye 2011). By the 1990s, the narrative of restoration and upliftment was beginning to fray under the economic pressures of the IMF-dictated Economic Structural Adjustment Program, the failures of which saw the political party that won at independence, ZANU-PF, begin to lose popularity amongst urban voters. Trouble was brewing with the War Veterans association too, representative of the freedom fighters who had brought about a liberation which bore few economic fruits, as the promised ideals of modernity and development for all did not materialise. In the late 1990s, the state decided to pay compensation to war veterans: but the money wasn’t there, which led to further economic decline. In 1999, the ZANU-PF government initiated the Fast Track Land Reform Process (FTLRP), which saw white commercial farmers dispossessed of farms and a massive redistribution process begin. Some of the farms in the Nharira area, including the farm in which the Nharira Hills is situated, were gazetted for redistribution in this process. Zimbabwe, in the present, can be said to be engaged in a project of what Comaroff and Comaroff (2012, p. 128) call “alternative modernities”: a deliberate attempt to move beyond colonial inheritances. In some ways this has been successful (e.g. land has been redistributed), but in many other ways the project has instead been waylaid by power, patronage, and corruption such that options have narrowed rather than blossomed for citizens. The country has seen staggering economic collapse since 2000. Economic decline has gone hand in hand with a decline in democratic freedoms, despite a lively rhetoric and performance of the rituals of democracy (Morreira 2016, pp. 39–46): though even the rhetoric has eroded since a coup saw former President Robert Mugabe ousted in

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

299

2017, replaced by current President Emmerson Mnangagwa. Economically, relations with the West have severely deteriorated, and a Look East Policy was adopted in the late 2000s, which has seen the rise of a broad based political and economic relationship with China. Ojakurutu and Kamidza (2018, p. 17) argue that in many instances the Look East Policy has benefitted the political and economic elite rather than the country, and they note that the Policy is opaque to citizens as its terms have not been formally and publicly developed and disseminated (ibid.). At present, Zimbabwe is on the precipice of hyperinflation and mass-hunger, and the political and economic future of the country is uncertain. In such a context, land and sacred places from which to petition the ancestors or God matter deeply: but so too, does the extractive mining economy. At Nharira, these concerns collide.

4   Case Study: Heritage and Land Use at Nharira Hills Nharira, located near Norton about 40 kilometres West of Harare, comprises a series of hills (Bvopfo, Gwirazenzara, Zvingwere, Chiburi, Mafemera, Vashamira, Machembere, Gwendesi, Chiturike, Gnoriono, Chemukoreka, Maringapasi, Zvetsoko, Chevakadzi, Chizhanje, Ziware raMuchembere, and Marimizike Hills) with caves and interconnected tunnels said to lead all the way to the Chirorodziva Caves in Chinhoi (also known as the ‘Chinhoyi Caves’). The land here is beautiful: the hills and caves are made of granite, surrounded by miombo woodland; and the flat areas in between are the fertile recipients of good summer rains. For centuries, each of the Nharira Hills have been used by the Moyo Ziruvi Nyamweda clan (the ‘Nyamweda clan’), and their wider community, who self-classify as the traditional custodians of Nharira, for a variety of different purposes. Some of the hills are used for rain-petitioning (mukwerera) ceremonies, whilst others are burial grounds for members of the clan. There are also sacred pools found in rivers running across the area; aged and meaningful artefacts buried across the area; rock paintings, and cave deposits and grain bins with century-old grain found in some of the caves. Beneath the Bvopfo (‘Somerby’) Caves monument, there is a granary in an underground cave with century-old clay pots full of sorghum, millet, and other grains.

300 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

From the 1890s onwards, European settlers started mining in Nharira. By around 1923, the Nyamweda clan were forcibly evicted from the area by the colonial settlers and moved to designated ‘native reserves’ or communal lands such as Mhondoro and Chisheweshe. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 legally allocated the land to European farmers and prohibited Africans from owning or occupying land in the area. The Rhodesian settlers divided the Nharira area into a number of different farms including Rasper Farm, Kilworth Estate, Lilfordia Farm, Saffron Walden Farm, and Bardwell/Stonehurst Farm. These farms have since been divided into a number of different plots. Somerby Farm, for example, includes Boulders Park, Snake Park and Lion and Cheetah Park: popular tourist sites to which generations of Zimbabwean children from Harare have been brought to look at confined snakes and wild animals, and picnic among the rocks. In 1938, the Bvopfo ‘Caves’ were gazetted by the National Museums and Monuments of Rhodesia as a National Monument in terms of the National Museums and Monuments Act [Chapter 25:11] as ‘Somerby Caves’ (E.N. 255 1938). However, only the exact location of the caves was gazetted, there were no boundaries provided, and the traditional custodians were not granted rights to reside on Somerby Farm to conduct ceremonies at the caves. This self-defined traditional community has petitioned National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ) to gazette a wider protected area around the caves on Somerby Farm to protect critical artefacts and graves purportedly buried across the farm. From the early 1960s, Sekuru Mushore—the late spirit medium and custodian of the sacred hills, from the Kawanzaruwa family of the Moyo Ziruvi Nyamweda Clan—started coming to Nharira to conduct rain-­ petitioning ceremonies, staying on Saffron Walden Farm once a year for three months at a time, having reached a gentleman’s agreement with Ross Hinde, the white farmer with legal title over the farm at the time. In 1964, Sekuru Mushore attempted to move onto the farm more permanently with members of his community, constructing huts. However, after six months they were subjected to an eviction order and their huts burnt by the Deputy Sheriff. After this, Sekuru Mushore resumed coming to the area only once a year to conduct rain-petitioning ceremonies. In the early 1990s, Sekuru Mushore and his relatives moved back onto the farm to permanently settle there. He was reportedly concerned that artefacts were being stolen and sacred grain bins destroyed. The white commercial farmers opposed the group permanently settling on the farm,

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

301

and initiated formal eviction proceedings, resulting in a conflict which the National Museums and Monuments were called in to mediate. After verifying the cultural, historical, and archaeological significance of the site, “Nharira Hills” (E.N. 2000) was gazetted as a National Heritage Site in 2000, upon the recommendation of the National Museums and Monuments, protecting the burial sites, rock paintings, cave deposits, and grain bins found on Saffron Walden Farm. It was at this time that the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe also formally recognised the Moyo Ziruvi Nyamweda clan as the traditional custodians of the site. The Nyamweda clan maintain that traditionally the entire Nharira area falls under Chief Nyamweda. However, the Nharira area was placed under the chieftainship of Chief Zvimba after the Nharira area was placed under Zvimba South District in 2000 and later Zvimba East District in 2008. Chief Beperere of the Gushungo Clan was also placed on Rasper Farm in 2015, in spite of the express objections of the Nharira community. Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe came from Zvimba, and the Nyamweda community claim he and the former Minister of Local Government Ignatius Chombo altered the district boundaries and installation of chiefs for political gain. The Fast Track Land Reform Programme started in 2000, in terms of which all the white commercial farmers in the Nharira area were evicted. Rasper, Kilworth, Lilfordia, and Saffron Walden Farms were listed for compulsorily acquisition by the state by Government Gazette Extraordinary. In terms of section 16B and Schedule 7 of the former Constitution (Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 17) Act 2005), and now section 72(4) of the current Constitution (Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 20) Act 2013) and the Land Acquisition Act [Chapter 20:10] (now the Gazetted Land (Consequential Provisions) Act [Chapter 20:28]), these farms became, and remain, vested in the state, but the land has been allocated by the state for occupation by virtue of offer letters, land resettlement leases or permits. Sekuru Mushore is understood to have been allocated land on Saffron Walden Farm by virtue of an offer letter from the Minister of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement, and as the traditional custodian of the ‘Nharira Hills’ heritage site on the farm. He is also understood to have been involved in the administration of offer letters for plots on Saffron Walden, Kilworth, Lilfordia, and Rasper Farms to relatives and other members of his community, nominated by him to safeguard and carry out

302 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

rites at the sites. Due to their smaller size, Somerby Farm and B ­ ardwell/ Stonehurst Farm plots were not gazetted during the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. They remain under private ownership. Sekuru Mushore passed away in 2009. His family, the Kawanzaruwas, and other members of the Nyamweda clan continue to act as the traditional custodians of Nharira. Members of the community settled on Saffron Walden, Kilworth, Lilfordia, and Rasper Farms have been able to protect these plots to an extent. However, as Somerby and Bardwell/ Stonehurst Farms were not gazetted, the traditional sites and burial grounds on these farms remain under threat from mining and farming activities. In 2001, a group under the leadership of Sekuru Mushore had moved onto Lot 1A of Somerby Farm, as custodians of the Bvopfo ‘Somerby’ Caves. There, they had established a registered cultural centre, Dzimbanhete Arts and Culture Interactions Trust, and applied for the land to be gazetted, but were ultimately never issued with legal rights of occupation. Lot 1 of Subdivision A of Somerby was sold by the previous white commercial farmer title-holders, the Scotts, to a private company in 2003. On 16 August 2018, the company issued a writ of ejectment against four individuals purportedly living on Lot 1A of Somerby Farm. On 14 December 2018, approximately 200 armed riot squad police officers with water cannons then forcibly evicted all 46 adults (only 2 of which had been served with a writ) and 136 children from the community living on site. They damaged houses using crowbars, threw the community’s possessions out into the open and burnt the central thatched house which contained relics, offerings, and over US $2000 that had been collected from the community for ceremonies. On 18 December 2018, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights lodged an urgent chamber application on behalf of the Nharira Heritage Trust, challenging the legality of the eviction by way of a spoliation application, but the case was struck off the urgent roll by the High Court on the basis that it was not ‘urgent’. The families have since relocated, some onto Stonehurst Farm, where they have leased a plot and re-established a Cultural Centre. Some members of the Kawanzaruwa family have also been granted limited access to the Bvopfo Caves to conduct ceremonies, but have been prohibited from staying on the property. The community have not been allowed to return to their homes to collect their possessions. In October 2018, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights also wrote on behalf of the Nharira community to various companies who purportedly

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

303

have mining claims in the Nharira area, including LaFarge Cement Zimbabwe (Ltd) and a Chinese-owned company called Berrytech Investments (Pvt) Ltd, objecting to the conducting of mining in the area on the basis that mining will desecrate the sacred sites in violation of the traditional community’s cultural, religious, traditional, and environmental rights protected in sections 3, 16, 33, 63, and 73 of the Constitution. On 6 November 2018, LaFarge Cement Zimbabwe (Ltd) confirmed that in 2015 they had been issued with granite (quarry) claims on Stonehurst Farm, sized 112 hectares and 75 hectares, by the Mining Commissioner under the Mines and Minerals Act [Chapter 21:05]. The company had carried out some pegging and construction of beacons in 2015, and further erection of beacons in 2018. However, in response to the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights’ intervention, LaFarge formally acknowledged the heritage, sacred possessions and social rights of the population inhabiting the area and authorised continued occupation of the site by the community pending further inquiries into their traditional rights. Berrytech Investments (Pvt) Ltd, also trading as Stonehurst Quarry and Sands, started sand abstraction and quarry mining on Stonehurst Farm in 2007 but temporarily suspended operations after complaints from the traditional community. However, in 2009, unknown to the traditional community, Berrytech Investments (Pvt) Ltd submitted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) application to the Environmental Management Agency who then issued an EIA Certificate on 22 August 2012, authorising them to conduct mining operations. Since October 2018, Berrytech Investments (Pvt) Ltd started re-pegging the area and since 2019 have been re-constructing a mine there. Berrytech Investments (Pvt) Ltd have also been conducting mining on Kilworth Estate for some time. The community report that rock paintings on the Estate were removed by National Museums and Monuments and that bodies were exhumed by miners during their mining activities. The Department of Lands also authorised an application for change of use of Plot No. 1 of Stonehurst Farm to allow for the operation of a ceramic manufacturing plant with another Chinese company, Sunny Yi Feng Tiles (Zimbabwe) (Pvt) (Ltd). Unknown to the traditional community, Sunny Yi Feng Tiles submitted an EIA application to the Environmental Management Agency in October 2018 and were issued with an EIA Certificate in June 2019. They are now conducting quarry mining and sand abstraction activities on the Farm.

304 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

Another Chinese-owned company, Edsabri Investments (Pvt) Ltd, was also purportedly granted a prospecting licence over Saffron Walden Farm, which incorporates the Nharira Hills heritage site. In 2018, they conducted digging and blasting on the site, reportedly desecrating traditional graveyards found there. However, National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe reportedly intervened in November 2018, directing Edsabri to stop their activities on Saffron Walden Farm resulting in mining activities having been suspended. Prospecting and mining claim rights are believed to have been granted all over the Nharira traditional heritage area. Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights are representing the traditional community to challenge the issuance of mining rights and EIA certificates over these different sites on the basis of the community’s traditional and environmental rights. The Ministry of Mines have declined to provide clarity on what mining claims are currently valid, stating only that they have written to the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe seeking clarification of the boundaries of the traditional heritage sites.

5   Discussion: Ways of Making Authority Through Knowledge A chronology of the use of land at Nharira shows competing forms of authority emerging at different moments. In the precolonial era, the forms of authority are based in (what are today locally called) traditional cosmologies. We have little access to the precolonial era through written archival evidence, but the Nyamweda clan are able to make claims about this era through oral history and the authority vested in Sekuru Mushore, who, as a spirit medium, was also able to speak for and with the ancestors, the living-dead who had lived in the area and who still reside in its rocks and trees. During colonisation, authority was wrested from indigenous inhabitants, and land ownership passed on to white settlers. In late colonialism, however, Sekuru Mushore was able to negotiate his way back to the Hills, although not in as settled a way as he and the community would wish. In the 1980s, official views on indigenous knowledge shifted as the new Zimbabwean state validated ways of life that under colonialism had been considered ‘backward’. For example, traditional healers were professionalised and brought into the public medical system in Zimbabwe, where in

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

305

Rhodesia the 1899 Witchcraft Suppression Act had positioned such healers as ‘witch doctors’ and illegitimised them (Chavanduka 1982, p. 27). Despite the epistemic violence of colonialism, multiple ways of knowing remained active into the postcolony, but the encounters between different knowledge systems were often sites of friction. The Fast Track Land Reform Program saw private ownership by white settlers fall away across much of the area and a new use of land—owned by the state, but occupied by the community on the basis of permits or offer letters—emerged. For a time, people were still able to access the Hills in the ways they wished to, and rain-petitioning and other rites could continue. The archaeological value was also retained. In the present moment, however, new forms of contestation are emerging, as yet unresolved: the value of farms no longer in the soil but in the rocks, reflective of a wider global capitalist politics of extraction (Szeman 2017, p.  440) that is destructive in ways that even colonialism was not. Here, traditional authority is no longer enough, and the community has turned to law to try to make particular claims in a space that is rapidly being encroached upon in violent ways. In what follows, we look first at the forms of authority that lie in indigenous knowledge, focusing our discussion on rain-petitioning. We then move to a legal analysis; ending with a consideration of the present-day politics of extraction. 5.1  On Petitioning for Rain In much of precolonial Southern Africa, petitioning for rain was central to political life (Livingston 2019, p.  13). Chiefs derived spiritual authority and concomitant political power from their ability to negotiate with the ancestors on behalf of, and with, their people, and petitioning for rain, bringer of life, was central to this process. While traditional authority at Nharira is vested in more than just knowledge about rain-bringing, we hone in on this act here in order to illustrate the fact that the Hills are pivotal in a vital social relationship between living persons, the land, trees, and the ancestors, or living-dead. Although colonialism enormously shifted the kinds of political authority that rain-petitioning could bring, the practice has remained alive across Southern Africa, and rain-petitioners still carry spiritual authority. In postcolonial Zimbabwe, the reasons for drought have remained open to contestation, with meteorological evidence alone considered insufficient (Nhemachena 2013, p. 110): in this

306 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

reading, science may provide evidence of where and how drought is occurring, but it does not provide the underlying moral reason for it. What does it mean to make rain? Nhemachena (2013, p.  110) has argued that the phrase in English into which the praxis of mukwerera was conventionally translated—rain-making—would better be described as rain-petitioning; this was echoed by respondents at Nharira, who when speaking of mukwerera in English use the word ‘petition’. The ancestors, mhondoro, make rain. The living are only able to negotiate with them for it. Rain-petitioning belies the chronologies on which much of Western thought is based, in that the world of the ancestors crosses temporalities. Events in the present such as drought are entangled with historical events: one explanation for recurrent drought in Zimbabwe has thus been that the correct ceremonies have not yet been performed following the violence of the Second Chimurenga and the continual violence of the present. Requesting rain relies on relationships across and between humans and non-humans: to petition rain requires people to come together, usually beneath a particular kind of tree, in a sacred place, with the presence of a spirit medium who can speak to the ancestors through the wind (Nhemachena 2013, p. 112). Rain, as the indispensable basis of life in this world, is thus anchored in the eternal life of the ancestors as the living-dead in the world just beyond this one. Rain needs be petitioned for through recurring rituals, administered by particular individuals with a relationship to the living-dead, the spirit mediums, in a particular symbolic site. In such a way, the relationship between those living in this world, those living in the world just beyond it, and the ever-present land is continued. Through this three-way connection between the living, the living-dead, and the land, the continuity and reproduction of the community is guaranteed. As Livingston (2019, p. 33) has noted, then, rain-making or petitioning is a political act in that it requires reciprocity between both those who are petitioning, and between the petitioners and the non-living whom they petition. Rain-petitioning relies on collective agreement and carefully curated sociality. Authority is conveyed by negotiations across multiple social realms, including those that are more-than-human. In a petition written by members of the re-established Cultural Centre at Nharira Hills to stop the mining in the area, then, it is not hyperbole or exaggeration at play where community members wrote, “They want to murder our mountains and do away with those sacred places that have sustained our ancestors and would sustain future generations after us”. Rocks are not just

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

307

granite, and sand is not just sand, although it may seem to be to quarry miners. What mining companies may see as the extraction of resources with an economic value is thus, to the local community, the destruction of a vital social-cosmological connection, which is conceptualised as the basis of life. It is, therefore, possible to murder a mountain and, in so doing, to put the life of future generations at serious risk. Sustenance is not just spiritual, but vital, of the flesh. In the petition they also write, “We must stand up for our heritage now, before another sale is completed, before another mountain suffers the indignity of a human-made grave, before we watch our heritage suffer and then see our children cry as a result. What will we tell them when they ask about the air and the water and the stones that carry all of our stories as people?” For residents, what is at stake is not just a place, but a larger set of relations that will influence the future. During the colonial era and the postcolonial time of white settler ownership of farms across Nharira Hills, ironically, it was possible for Sekuru Mushore to maintain spiritual authority through his position as spirit medium and elder, and thus to access the land, in ways that are becoming increasingly difficult for his descendants. Such access was not unlimited, however, and the law was used to prevent the Nyamweda clan from settling more permanently, which positioned them as sojourners into Nharira rather than inhabitants; even where the mhondoro still permanently inhabited the space. There was a conflict during the colonial era, then, between indigenous knowledge systems and colonial political systems. Where the indigenous knowledge system recognised the mhondoro spirits as having a continued claim over the land, which should in turn have given rise to their living descendants having a physical claim to that same land, the colonial secular political system saw the land as commercial farmland that now belonged to the Rhodesian settlers. In the colonial imaginary, sacred sites on that farmland were viewed as interesting enough to protect, but not seen as a living, ontological reality. Sekuru Mushore could thus access the granite hills and sacred caves (which, after all, may have been on the farms but couldn’t themselves be farmed) but only temporarily, and through a gentleman’s agreement. In the postcolonial setting, further conflicting perspectives arose: the FTLRP very briefly opened a space for more permanent inhabitation, but the present moment is seeing that space shut down, and villagers violently evicted. In the postcolonial moment, then, the conflict has become one between indigenous knowledge systems which recognise the mhondoro as living and present, and a new form of secular, extractive capitalism that no longer sees farmland and

308 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

anthropologically interesting hills and caves, but instead only sees valuable granite, and valueless bones and old clay pots. Indigenous knowledge systems are entangled with other ways of knowing, however, such that where law on ownership was previously used to keep the Nyamweda clan out, laws on heritage and tradition are now being drawn on by them to attempt to maintain their space within Nharira, and to keep the miners out. In what follows we move from sacred authority to a discussion of the law, looking at legal decisions over time, using the lens of legal analysis to speak to a different epistemological positioning and different kind of authority, at play in the same geopolitical location. 5.2  On Law The Nharira area was historically governed by the customary laws of Mashonaland. In terms of customary law, ‘the land and its resources belong to the community’ (Matebeleland Order in Council, 18 July 1894, C.O. 417/121). There were no absolute rights of ownership of land. Chief Nyamweda, as the traditional custodian of the area, governed the use and occupation of the land according to the community’s requirements. When the colonial settlers arrived at Nharira, under the administration of the British South Africa Company, they purported to peg their mining claims and farms in terms of the 1891 Lippert Concession ‘granted’ by Lobengula.3 However, the Lippert Concession can be read as a legal fiction, as Lobengula had no right in customary law to make such a grant (Palmer 1977, pp.  27–28). The Privy Council confirmed that the Concession was valueless as a title deed, and when hut tax was first proposed in 1893, the British government acknowledged that “the natives are probably in law and equity the real owners of the land they occupy” and the proposed tax amounted to a “charge […] for the occupation of their own lands” (Palmer 1977, p. 43). Unfortunately by the time of its judgement in 1918, the Privy Council were not willing to recognise the property rights of indigenous people, infamously ruling that “whoever now owns the unalienated lands, the natives do not” (In re Southern Rhodesia,

3  Chief Lobengula (1845–1894) was the Chief of the Matabele people, who negotiated with the BSAC and granted white settlers the rights to tracts of land. However, land is not a ‘marketable commodity’ in terms of customary law, and Lobengula was not the traditional custodian of Mashonaland.

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

309

[1919] A.C. 211, p.  235). Authority over land was thus wrested away entirely from the indigenous inhabitants. After Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony in 1923, the Native Regulations Act (1924) empowered the Native Affairs Department to forcibly evict all indigenous peoples to the ‘Native Reserves’. By 1930, the Land Apportionment Act was passed, later succeeded by the Land Tenure Act 1969. In terms of this legislation, Rhodesia was officially segregated into ‘Native’ and ‘European’ areas, barring indigenous people from owning and occupying land in their ancestral home of Nharira, other than as farm labourers. The ‘Native’ areas were later called Tribal Trust Land (Tribal Trust Land Act 1979 (No.6 of 1979)), and only in these areas were communal property rights practiced and recognised. The effects of the racial segregation and forced eviction of the indigenous Nyamweda community are still very much felt today. Although the larger farms were gazetted for compulsory acquisition by the state under the Fast Track Land Reform Process in 2001, and Sekuru Mushore and other members of the traditional community were allocated land in the area, the smaller farms such as Somerby Farm (where ‘Somerby Caves’ is located) were not gazetted and remained under private ownership. The Fast Track Land Reform Process did nothing to recognise indigenous people’s communal property rights over the whole of the Nharira area as interconnected ancestral lands holding great cultural and spiritual significance to the community. Although the Nharira area does have a traditional leader to preside over customary law matters in terms of the Traditional Leaders Act [Chapter 19:17], the current chief, Chief Zvimba, was imposed on the community by alterations of the boundaries of the Rural District Councils for political expediency, in that Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe came from Zvimba, and the Nyamweda community claim that he and the former Minister of Local Government Ignatius Chombo altered the district boundaries and installation of chiefs for political gain. He is not recognised by the Nyamweda people, who only recognise Chief Nyamweda as the traditional custodian of the area. As a new chief to the area, Chief Zvimba would not be aware of which sacred spaces should be protected. Nhamo and Katsamudanga have argued that the fact that the FTLRP did not redistribute land on the basis of ancestral connections to place has resulted in “lack of cultural continuity [which] means that important places get destroyed through lack of knowledge” (Nhamo and Katsamudanga 2015, p. 320). Furthermore, communal land rights are not

310 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

applied over what is now private and state land in the areas once designated as ‘European’ such as Nharira, only in Communal Areas in terms of the Communal Land Act [Chapter 20:04], the postcolonial version of the Tribal Trust Land Act. As a result, the Nharira ancestral lands have been divided up into multiple plots with each occupier or owner having their own private (mostly economic) interests in the land, with the traditional community having limited access to only some of the sacred sites, such as those on Saffron Walden Farm, but being deprived of access to others. Zimbabwe’s seemingly advanced archaeological heritage management system has done little to address this, as it is based on a colonial system that prioritised preservation over use of traditional sites. The Legislative Council of Southern Rhodesia first passed the Ancient Monuments Protection Ordinance in 19024 to address settlers’ looting of heritage sites. The Monuments and Relics Act (No. 8 of 1936) was then passed, providing for the declaration of national monuments, and in 1938 ‘Somerby Caves’ (on Somerby Farm) was gazetted as a National Monument Archaeological Rock Painting (E.N 255 1938). In 1972, the National Museums and Monuments of Rhodesia Act was promulgated, later replaced by the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe Act, in terms of which the ‘Nharira Hills’ Heritage site (Number 169 in 2000) on Saffron Walden Farm was gazetted. Under the National Museums and Monuments Act, traditional heritage sites that have been declared as national monuments are now ‘owned’ by the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ), who regulate any excavation, alteration, destruction, damage, or removal of any ancient monument, national monument, or relic from the sites. Unfortunately, by placing the NMMZ as the custodians over traditional heritage, the Act “fails to accommodate or promote indigenous knowledge systems” (Chiwaura 2005, pp. 18–21) in terms of which of the chiefs and headmen are the traditional custodians. “Further, heritage management totally excludes and ignores customary laws, hence there is no community participation in cultural heritage management” (ibid.). Finally, with the exception of the ‘Nharira Hills’ monument on Saffron Walden Farm, to which Sekuru Mushore’s family were issued an offer letter and thus have unlimited access, “the process of listing monuments on the National Register effectively barricade[s] local communities from the 4

 And later the Bushman Relics Ordinance of 1911.

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

311

heritage” (Chipunza 2009, pp. 18–21), as is the case for the traditional community evicted from Somerby Farm. This gives an example of coloniality continuing into the present, in that heritage laws are designed to protect spaces and artefacts, rather than to facilitate contemporary practices of indigenous knowledge. Furthermore, the National Museums and Monuments Act and the Mines and Minerals Act [Chapter 21:05] allows for mining claims to be issued on heritage sites, even though it is “mandatory to carry out impact assessment before engaging in earth-moving activities” (ibid.) in terms of section 97 and the First Schedule of the Environmental Management Act [Chapter 20:27] and the Environmental Management (Environmental Impact Assessment & Ecosystems Protection) Regulations, 2007. In terms of section 10(4) of these Regulations, the developer is required to carry out wide consultations with stakeholders. However, in practice the Environmental Impact Assessment Certificates that have been issued to Berrytech and Sunny Yi Feng Tiles were issued without consultation of the traditional custodians. It would appear that the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe may have been consulted in their place, effectively silencing the voices of those people with an ancestral connection to Nharira. From a legal perspective, it is clear from the above that the rights of the indigenous Nyamweda people have been repeatedly violated since 1890, throughout various periods of legislative reform. More recent reforms may allow for more positive developments for indigenous peoples5 and local communities in Zimbabwe going forward. Since 2013, the Constitution of Zimbabwe provides protection for 5  In Zimbabwe, the term ‘indigenous community’ is used broadly to apply to “a community of persons that has inhabited Zimbabwe continuously since before the year 1890 and whose members share the same language or dialect or the same cultural values, traditions or customs”, Statutory Instrument 61 of 2009 Environmental Management (Access to Genetic Resources and Indigenous Genetic Resource-based Knowledge) Regulations. The African Commission has also adopted a broad interpretation of “indigenous people” determined on the basis of self-identification; a special attachment to and use of traditional land whereby ancestral land and territory have a fundamental importance for collective physical and cultural survival as peoples; and a state of subjugation, marginalisation, dispossession, exclusion, or discrimination because these peoples have different cultures, ways of life, or mode of production than the national hegemonic and dominant model. (The Advisory Opinion Of The African Commission On Human And Peoples’ Rights On The United Nations Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by The African Commission On Human And Peoples’ Rights At Its 41st Ordinary Session Held In May 2007 in Accra, Ghana, p. 4.)

312 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

traditional communities to the extent of ensuring respect for their cultural and traditional values; the equitable sharing of national resources; the preservation of cultural values and practices which enhance the dignity, well-being, and equality of Zimbabweans; the protection of indigenous knowledge systems; freedom of belief; the right to participate in the cultural life of one’s choice; the right to human dignity; the right to equality and non-discrimination; the right to a healthy environment; and the right to be informed and consulted in accordance with the right to administrative justice. Zimbabwe is also a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which provides that indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories; no relocation shall take place without the free, prior, and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option of return; and indigenous peoples have the right to practise and revitalise their cultural traditions and customs, which include their right to maintain, protect, and develop the past, present, and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites and artefacts. Finally, Zimbabwe is also a state party to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, the provisions of which have been interpreted in the landmark cases of Centre for Minority Rights Development (Kenya) and Minority Rights Group International on behalf of Endorois Welfare Council v. Kenya6 and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights v. Republic of Kenya7 to provide extensive protections for indigenous peoples. The African Commission and African Court on Human and Peoples Rights awarded extensive collective reparations to the Endorois and Ogiek indigenous peoples in these cases, upholding their communal property rights to have free access to, and use of, their ancestral lands to practice their traditional ceremonies in accordance with their cultural beliefs. It is hoped that the rights protected in the Zimbabwean Constitution will be applied and developed in accordance with the international law principles highlighted, to provide greater protection for communities such as the Nyamweda community to access and use their ancestral lands and 6  ACHPR.  Communication 276 / 2003  – Centre for Minority Rights Development (Kenya) and Minority Rights Group International on behalf of Endorois Welfare Council v. Kenya. 7  African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights v. Republic of Kenya, ACtHPR, Application No. 006/2012 (2017).

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

313

sacred spaces in the future. At Nharira, legal authority has, at different moments, kept indigenous people away from land or kept indigenous people from using it in the ways they would wish, as well as, at other moments, providing and protecting access to indigenous people. At present, legal authority is being appealed to by the custodians of the land where traditional authority has failed. However, at Nharira, conversations between ZLHR and the government are ongoing, and it is not yet clear whether legal instruments protecting heritage are powerful enough to override economic imperatives and private property rights. Szeman (2017, p. 440) reminds us that “[i]n order to function at all, and especially given their size and scale, capitalist societies and economies require endless physical inputs, from fossil fuels to minerals, from potash to agricultural goods”. Global capitalism exerts a particular kind of authority, and it is one which has increasingly resulted in widening inequalities between rich and poor. Zimbabwe exists within such globalised conditions of capitalist modernity, and the economic collapse of the past 20 years has also seen the rise of a political and economic elite. At Nharira, a politics of extraction of rock through mining is being placed into conflict with laws designed to protect both environment and heritage. Should the rocks be mined, elite interests, driven by international markets, will take precedence over local knowledge and (legally protected) intangible cultural heritage: despite a political rhetoric of Zimbabwe’s ‘alternative modernity’ as protective of indigeneity. It remains to be seen what the outcome will be.

6   Conclusion In this chapter, we have considered the competing claims to authority and their relationship to ways of knowing at play at Nharira. We have argued that power and knowledge are entangled, and that knowledge is not neutral (Foucault 1979), such that the longer epistemological effects of coloniality (Mignolo 2011) are seen through the continued valuing of ideas of modernity, development, and extractive notions of economic success continue into the present, with lived effects upon land and people’s access to it. We examined the conflicts and confluences between kinds of knowledge, to speak to the varied forms of authority at work in contemporary postcolonial Zimbabwe: so-called traditional knowledge about sacred spaces, as it emerges in the present; legal knowledge about heritage and indigenous rights; and the current politico-economic logic that sees a different, monetary value in the Hills. We see this epistemic pluralism as a

314 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

means through which authority, as legitimised power, is made: the strategic use of different epistemological frameworks at different moments by inhabitants of the postcolony in order to lay claim to geographical and political space. In some ways, Nharira is unique, especially to those for whom it is sacred. But in other ways, Nharira is just one example amongst many others in Zimbabwe of the ways in which knowledge, power, and politics can be enfolded into land; and the ways in which access to land and the ability to use it can be used as a source of authority. The case study we have presented here, in thinking through ideas of legitimacy and power in contemporary Zimbabwe, reminds us that authority is always in flux and the future never certain.

References Chavanduka, Gordon (1982). Witches, Witchcraft and the Law in Zimbabwe. In: Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association Miscellaneous Paper No. 1. Chipunza, Kundishora (2009). Protection of Immovable Cultural Heritage in Zimbabwe: An Evaluation. In: Ndoro, Webber / Pwiti, Gilbert (Eds.), Legal Frameworks for the Protection of Immovable Cultural Heritage in Africa. Rome: ICCROM, pp. 42–45. Chiwaura, Henry (2005). The Development of Formal Legislation and the Recognition of Traditional Customary Law in Zimbabwe’s Heritage Management. In: Ndoro, Webber / Pwiti, Gilbert (Eds.), Legal Frameworks for the Protection of Immovable Cultural Heritage in Africa. Rome: ICCROM, pp. 18–21. Comaroff, Jean / Comaroff, John (2012). Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. In: Anthropological Forum, 22 (2), pp. 113–131. Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York, NY: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel (1979). Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth: Peregrine. Livingston, Julie (2019). Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable from Southern Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, Walter (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morreira, Shannon (2016). Rights After Wrongs: Human Rights and Local Knowledge in Zimbabwe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nhamo, Ancila / Katsamudanga, Seke (2015). The Impact of the Fast-Track Land Reform on the Preservation and Management of Archaeological Heritage in Zimbabwe. In: Makwavarara, Zifikile / Magosvongwe, Ruby / Mlambo, Obert

  SACRED SPACES, LEGAL CLAIMS 

315

(Eds.), Dialoguing Land and Indigenisation in Zimbabwe and Other Developing Countries: Emerging Perspectives. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, pp. 309–324. Nhemachena, Artwell (2013). Are Petitioners Makers of Rain? Rain, Worlds and Survival in Conflict-Torn Buhera, Zimbabwe. In: Green, Lesley (Ed.), Contested Ecologies. Cape Town: HSRC Press, pp. 110–125. Nuttall, Sarah (2009). Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-­ Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Ojakurutu, Victor / Kamidza, Rumbidzai (2018). Look East Policy: The Case of Zimbabwe-China Political and Economic Relations Since 2000. In: India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 74 (1), pp. 17–41. Palmer, Robin (1977). Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia. London: Heinemann. Raftopolous, Brian (2004). Current Politics in Zimbabwe: Confronting the Crisis. In: Harold-Barry, David (Ed.), Zimbabwe: The Past is the Future – Rethinking Land, State, and Nation in the Context of Crisis. Harare: Weaver Press, pp. 1–18. Sachikonye, Lloyd (2011). When a State Turns on Its Citizens: Institutionalized Violence and Political Culture. Johannesburg: Jacana Press. Szeman, Imre (2017). On the Politics of Extraction. In: Cultural Studies, 31 (2–3), pp. 440–447. Tsing, Anna (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Case Law African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights v. Republic of Kenya (African Court on Human and People’s Rights, Application No. 006/2012 (2017)). Advisory Opinion of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 41st Ordinary Session, May 2007, Accra, Ghana, at page 4.). Centre for Minority Rights Development (Kenya) and Minority Rights Group International on behalf of Endorois Welfare Council v Kenya (African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Communication 276 of 2003). In re Southern Rhodesia, [1919] A.C. 211, p. 235.

Statutes, Ordinances and Regulations Ancient Monuments Protection Ordinance (1902, Legislative Council of Southern Rhodesia). Bushman Relics Protection Ordinance (1911, Legislative Council of Southern Rhodesia).

316 

S. MORREIRA AND F. ILIFF

Communal Land Act [Chapter 20:04], Zimbabwe. Constitution (Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 17) Act, 2005), Zimbabwe. Constitution (Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 20) Act, 2013), Zimbabwe. Environmental Management Act [Chapter 20:27], Zimbabwe. Environment Management (Environmental Impact Assessment and Ecosystems Protection) Regulations, 2007 (S.I. 7 of 2007, Chapter 20:27), Zimbabwe. Environmental Management (Access to Genetic Resources and Indigenous Genetic Resource-based Knowledge) Regulations (S.I. 61 of 2009, Chapter 20:27), Zimbabwe. Gazetted Land (Consequential Provisions) Act [Chapter 20:28], Zimbabwe. Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act [Chapter 14:33]. Land Apportionment Act [1930], Southern Rhodesia. Land Acquisition Act [Chapter 20:10], Zimbabwe. Land Tenure Act [1969], Rhodesia. Matebeleland Order in Council, 18 July 1894 [C.O. 417/121]. Mines and Minerals Act [Chapter 21:05], Zimbabwe. Monuments and Relics Act [No. 8 of 1936], Rhodesia. National Museums and Monuments of Rhodesia Act [No. 17 of 1972], Rhodesia. National Museums and Monuments Act [Chapter 25:11], Zimbabwe. Native Regulations Act [1924], Southern Rhodesia. Nharira Hills Shona Historical Site National Monument, No.169 [E.N. 2000], Zimbabwe. Somerby Caves Rock Painting Archaeological Site, National Monument No. 22 [E.N. 255 of 1938], Rhodesia. Traditional Leaders Act [Chapter 19:17], Zimbabwe. Tribal Trust Land Act [No.6 of 1979], Rhodesia. Witchcraft Suppression Act [Chapter 09:19], Zimbabwe.

PART IV

Conflict, (In)Justice, and Plural Legitimacies

A Magic Momentum: Negotiating Authority in the Bongolava Region, Madagascar Peter Kneitz

1   Introduction In July 2017, the hamlet Ankitsikitsika, located in the Bongolava region in middle-western Madagascar, became the target of an attack. The owner of the small village shop and his wife stayed silently on the terrace of their one-story house during the late evening, when they saw some persons arriving in the dark. At first convinced that they were track readers of a neighboring village, pursuing lost cattle, they soon became disabused. The arriving men were in fact bandits and, becoming aware that their presence was unveiled, they fired at the shop owner’s house with their guns, fortunately without hurting anybody. The shop owner rapidly got his own gun out and fired back. Nonetheless, the bandits, usually known locally by the This project was supported by the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014–2020) under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 702497 – DySoMa. P. Kneitz (*) University Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_12

319

320 

P. KNEITZ

generic term mavo (‘The Yellow Ones,’ referring to the supposedly dirty clothes of the robbers) succeeded to seize a herd of about 35 zebus, the Malagasy variant of tropical cattle with a hump, an important part of the shop owner’s property. Later, the villagers of Ankitsikitsika, including a gendarme deployed nearby, followed the cattle tracks, but vainly. This occasion was another proof for them that the state was not able to protect them, and they felt forced to come back to an age-old topic of rural Madagascar: the problem of how to develop a successful strategy for more effective protection and survival. This time, they decided to try a kind of new option which, at the same time, was linked to what is perceived by most villagers as long or traditional-established local wisdom. They wished to get in touch with the recently organized Zazamainty (‘The Children of the Black’), a vigilante group, whose sometimes violent actions to defend villagers against bandits are based essentially on a logic of magic beliefs and practices. The case sketched aims to give a first impression of a central dilemma to which a main part of the Malagasy population has been exposed in past years. On the one side, there is a powerful but negligent, difficult to understand and often corrupt state, related again to a mighty global discourse on democracy, civil society, and global human rights, among others, while on the other side, there is the more hidden truth of what is perceived as one’s own tradition and specific Malagasy cultural practices. To which register of authority one should turn, compelled by the daily fight for survival? Which of the competing values are more convincing, more legitimate, and, as a central point of the perpetual reflection, more effective or powerful for the central aim of defeating insecurity, and to protect oneself, and one’s family’s lives? The ethnographically informed observations on Madagascar presented in this chapter  are hinting toward that kind of heterogeneous or plural authorities of diverse and intertwined local and global origin, which is at the heart of the general theoretical challenge addressed through this collective volume. How the legitimacy necessary for effective authority is negotiated, dismissed, or approved within the specific African context? And how does the diversity of given local cultural landscapes of authority interact or intermingle with the manifold strands of a new global normativity, channeled through the accelerated access to information, though international organizations or economic dependencies, among others? The overall theoretical challenge of this book to explore the ways authority is negotiated in African societies is addressed in my contribution by the elaboration of an

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

321

empiric case study in Madagascar. My objective is to elaborate heuristic insights into the Malagasy dynamics of authority and legitimacy as it is discussed and practiced between villagers, vigilantes, cattle rustlers, or various representatives of the national state in the middle-western area of the island. The momentary preference of a traditional code of authority by villagers, it will be shown later, should be rather understood as the outcome of rational weighing of the effectivity of the register of authority chosen, and not as resulting of an essentialist or categoric judgment. Not abstract and categoric recognition, or refusal of legitimacy is at stake, but usefulness in terms of the lasting fight for everyday survival. Due to highly increased levels of insecurity caused by widespread banditry in the past decade (ca. 2009–2019), the inhabitants of many rural areas in Madagascar were forced into action, and to find solutions for what they often expressed, and experienced, as existential threats to their way of living. This meant, inevitably, that they were forced to re-evaluate, in an ongoing and open process, the possible sources of local power, authority, and legitimacy, to reflect on the solutions these resources would imply, and to analyze the preliminary results. More specifically, this chapter will focus on the unfolding of a new kind of vigilante movement since 2016, with the two associations Zazamainty and Lambamena (‘Red Scarfs’) as prominent examples. The preliminary success of these groups, I will argue, is essentially related to the experience of state authority as ineffective and corrupt, pushing villagers to seek help from those actors linked to sacred or local authority, creating thereby a magic momentum. At the same time, though, local actors were not particularly interested in deciding which of the different regimes of power in place are truly legitimate or not, and in which they would believe, as Weber suggested (1972, p. 123). Rather, they used an approach governed by practical thoughts and ambitions. Which of the possible resources of power and authority at hand, they seemed to ask, is most suitable in the given circumstances? In the first section, a short overview will present some essentials of the present state of research on the question of negotiating authority and legitimacy in Africa. A second point will address the specific Malagasy situation in this respect, including some of the characteristics of the historic trajectory of power on this island. Part three starts the ethnographic case by introducing the field and the central challenge of insecurity for the population of the Bongolava region. Part four will present the core

322 

P. KNEITZ

elements of my findings and highlight the conditions which led to the rising importance of vigilantes linked to traditional authority.

2   Negotiating Authority, Legitimacy, and Violence in Africa If there is one main empiric result of the research on legitimacy and the making of power or authority in independent sub-Saharan Africa,1 it is the relative weakness of public authority and ‘the’ state. This observation urged, and urges, to rediscover what tends to be rather hidden behind the surface of the overwhelming and omnipotent modern state in Europe, and elsewhere: that the belief in a legally based order of society (Weber 1972, p. 123) is not given and natural but acquired. Other possibilities of making authority, broadly circumscribed by the aforementioned editors as “a social relationship of superiority and subordination” (Introduction, p.  3), or the underlying belief, into legitimacy are existent and, if they emerge, create very different constellations and negotiations of power. In the introduction of this volume, the understanding of ‘authority,’ as “an always socially constructed rather than normatively predefined idea” (Introduction, p. 5) as well as the difficulties to understand, and define analytically the relationship between authority, power, and legitimacy (pp. 5–8) has already been noted. For Africa, the interplay between authority and ‘tradition’ or ‘traditional authority,’ another set of socially ‘invented’ ideas (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), has been historically explored as a main aspect (see overview and critique in the introduction of this volume, pp. 6–7). The erosion of (colonial) governmental structures in Africa appears to result from the alienness of the state project of western origin to the local agendas of the respective societies. Such relative distance, disinterest, or incomprehension allowed elites to use state resources for their own private aims, resulting in what has famously been described as the “politics of the belly” (Bayart 1989). According to this view, the state in Africa is possessed by a strong dynamic toward corruption and nepotism, leading to a criminalization of the state (Chabal 1999) in the form of an “alliance between elite cliques and global economic interests” (Duffy 2007, p. 187), as the latter study on the contemporary situation in Madagascar put it. With regard to the standards of well-established states elsewhere, the characterization of 1

 If not stated otherwise, in the following, ‘Africa’ always refers to sub-Saharan Africa.

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

323

the African state as “failed” (Englebert and Tull 2008) appears suggestive. Postcolonial “disorder” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006) was another key term proposed for approaching this phenomenon. A closer investigation, though, shows that, while the legal state might be fading and becoming a façade, a new kind of “innovative and unexpected space” (Klute and Bellagamba 2008, p. 11) for negotiating power, legitimacy, and authority is developing in Africa, located ‘beside,’ ‘below,’ or ‘beyond’ (ibid.; cf. Akude et al. 2011) the state. This “shadow state” (Reno 2000) can be described as a ‘black box,’ as it consists of difficult-to-­ penetrate “blurred zones of […] sovereignty” (Klute and Bellagamba 2008, p. 11), leading to the development of “twilight institutions” (Lund 2007). What seems to happen is that all interest groups present—be they of local, national, or global background—are interacting dynamically within each given political context, searching for a kind of equilibrium of always fragile order. The development of a new vigilante phenomenon in Africa should be seen as part of this social process (Kirsch and Grätz 2010). Considerable advantage, though, is in the hands, as one might predict, of the already-dominant elite actors at the national level, especially when it comes to the question of access to important sources of income. In this understanding, the weakness of the legal African state should not obscure the substantial strength of the ‘real state’ in Africa, that is, the strength of those power structures defending their clandestine or often indirect control over the distribution of primary resources. The claiming of authority and legitimacy, consequently, should be read as an important element within this ‘game.’ My case study will serve to illustrate and to confirm this general theoretical understanding by adding insights from the particularities of the ethnographic field presented. The villagers of the Bongolava region, it will be argued, have to navigate between the dominance of an ineffective democratic state authority, whose principals are sustained by a powerful global discourse, on the one side, and the independent empowerment of local forces like vigilantes, whose actions are regularly linked to an authority created by widespread magical beliefs or through constantly reworked ‘tradition,’ on the other side. Both registers of legitimacy are followed simultaneously but arranged and adapted in an ongoing and open process, which is embedded within an already long-established cultural framework of how to deal with a situation of multiple powers, authorities, and legitimacies, alluding again to the necessity, and analytical power, of an

324 

P. KNEITZ

“investigation into African social and cultural configurations on their very own terms” (Introduction, p. 10).

3   Negotiating Authority on Madagascar Many aspects of the postcolonial state of Madagascar since independence fit quite well into the African pattern sketched earlier. Apparently, the growing dysfunction of the legal state was accompanied by the development of a Malagasy variant of the shadow state (Duffy 2007, p. 190). Rural areas, for example, might be understood as a sort of “provisional autonomous zone” (Graeber 2007, p. 24), as David Graeber interpreted the region around Betafo (southern highlands). This means that they appear as “effectively outside state power” (ibid., p. 25) while, at the same time, they do “not stand entirely outside it” (ibid.). The political elites are drawn into nepotism or different practices of enrichment based on the prerogatives linked to their official functions (e.g. Galibert 2009, pp.  84–95). Many of the main resources of the island are exploited by criminal networks (Pellerin 2017); gemstone mining, which connects miners “with globalized networks of international dealers and elite cliques who ensure that the stones can be illegally exported for personal financial gain” (Duffy 2007, p.  193), is a particularly well-elaborated example. Another important case is cattle rustling. Banditry focusing on zebu cattle, the main cause of insecurity in regions like the Bongolava, seems to be primarily driven by commercial aims, based on a close cooperation between thieves, state functionaries, Malagasy elite families, and foreign traders (Pellerin 2017, p.  18; Scheidecker 2016, p.  130). The shadow state in Madagascar is particularly ‘successful,’ it has been shown, as it generated a continuing economical spiral downwards in the last five decades. This presents a surprising and unique case even among postcolonial African countries (Razafindrakoto et al. 2017, p. 18). To put it bluntly, one might say that the public image of an effective and protective Malagasy state is a kind of “scam” (Graeber 2007, p. 21). As the legitimacy of the state is beyond question in any official discourse, everybody recognizes it nominally. But at the same time, everybody knows that the main power is somewhere hidden in the shadow of the state façade, that it is in the hands of those who know how to effectively manipulate the state and state legitimacy, and that one should adapt one’s own actions to this situation as well as possible. Before looking closer at the toolbox at the disposal of the population for challenging and negotiating

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

325

authority in a context of general disorder, and investigating the socio-­ political space constituted thereby, a brief look at the bigger historical picture is useful, as it allows us to locate the problems of disorder and negotiating legitimacy within the greater framework of the Malagasy culture. 3.1  A Long History of Insecurity, Self-Defense, and Search for Authority Everyday insecurity and disorder caused by banditry, and more particularly cattle raiding, one should not forget, are not at all new, but are many centuries old, and are related phenomena in most parts of Madagascar. The indications of this include evidence of defensive architecture since the tenth or eleventh century (Beaujard 2012, pp. 323–329; Radimilahy and Crossland 2015, p. 304; Wright 2007, p. 109), cattle raiding in the seventeenth century (e.g. Flacourt 1661, pp. 95–96) and a long history of a belligerent island, with neighboring political units, often related by kinship, fighting regularly against each other (Kneitz 2016, pp.  46–47). Because there existed no important and subordinate political structures most of the time and in most regions, one must assume that self-defense by local groups or clans was a deeply  engraved familiar strategy for the main parts of the Malagasy population over the centuries. The establishment of the Merina Kingdom in the nineteenth century, the French colony (1896–1960), and the independent Malagasy Republic, however, implied aspirations to closer control of the territory and people by the respective dynasty or government. These political constructions claimed to control all means of physical violence as an attribute of their authority, promising their population effective protection in return—a promise which was only ever partially delivered. What concerns the postcolonial Malagasy situation since 1960, a trend toward heightening insecurity and a return to cattle rustling after a probably quieter period since colonization has been recognizable since the 1970s (Rasamoelina 2007), accompanying cyclical political crises (1971–1972, 1990–1992, 2000–2002, 2009–2011) and the trend toward the aforementioned Malagasy shadow state. The development of criminal structures, based on a cooperation of zebu raiders (dahalo, mavo, malaso), functionaries, and traders, was further stimulated by the trend of liberalization and globalization since the 1990s (Pellerin 2017; Scheidecker 2016, p.  130). After the situation calmed down for a few years, in the

326 

P. KNEITZ

beginning of President Ravalomanana’s first mandate (2003–2008), the political crises of 2009 meant another increase in insecurity and cattle raiding. In January 2009, the political confrontation between Marc Ravalomanana, the recently (2008) re-elected President of Madagascar, and Andry Rajoelina, mayor of the country’s capital city of Antananarivo, heated up rapidly. In March 2009, Rajoelina seized power by force, but this victory didn’t mean a return to a stable situation, as the international community refused to acknowledge the transition of power as regular and in conformity with democratic standards. The weakness of the so-called Malagasy transitional government (2009–2013) and the following regular government (2013–2018) continued for many years. Only in 2019 was political stability achieved, when Andry Rajoelina emerged victorious from an election process recognized as eligible. During this long decade of political uncertainty, the issue of insecurity caused by bandits remained one of the main problems of the local and national public agenda. As the financial flow from the international community dried up, and the government was in constant search for support, this caused a strengthening of criminal networks, including those linked to cattle raiding (Pellerin 2017). In this time newspapers reported, on a daily basis, on attacks throughout Madagascar. According to some of the few published official statistics, on an average one attack per day was registered between 2011 and 2016 (Les Nouvelles 2016), and more than two people—mostly bandits, but civilians and gendarmes as well—were killed daily (L’Express 2018). As neither all attacks nor all defensive actions of villagers, including problematic clandestine lynchings of (presumed) bandits, are officially registered, these figures should be regarded as the lower end of the margin. Public authorities tried, according to the presentation of the government, to do their best in protecting the population, including the establishment of special forces destined to fight against cattle thieves (e.g. Tribune.com 2016). Sometimes battles were fought between hundreds of cattle thieves, villagers, and heavily armed state security forces. The long-­ term investigation to get hold of a notorious leader of cattle rustlers in the south of Madagascar, called Ramenabila, became a particularly renowned case (e.g. Tribune.com 2012).2 At the same time, though, rural communities were largely dissatisfied with the situation. The main  Ramenabila is said to have died around 2014 (Mediapart 2019).

2

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

327

problem regularly evoked was that of long-standing corruption. Bandits arrested by gendarmes or by villagers themselves, and delivered for conviction to a court, it was claimed, could often free themselves by paying a bribe. Consequently, state actions were regarded as useless if the legal institutions would not do their work. Actions of self-defense organized by the villagers themselves, however, were also perceived as insufficient, and not able to cope with the permanent danger of raids. All these events resonated in the Bongolava region, as in any other region of Madagascar.3 3.2  A Murky Situation Before elaborating, in the following chapter, some important elements of how the population of the Bongolava region reacted to this present challenge of insecurity, it is useful to reflect for a moment on the instruments the rural population have at their disposal, the deeper cultural patterns that are guiding the overall way to act, and what kind of space for negotiating authorities is created thereby. Obviously, villagers are caught in a predicament, between the legal authority of the state on the one side, and their understanding that to follow this authority naively would possibly create problems  or even may cause easily existential threats, on the other side. Consequently, they seem to opt, in my fieldwork-informed observation, for a strategy that makes use of the different available modes or registers of legitimacy in place according to their possibilities. These registers of legitimacy include, roughly speaking, all that is based on local rights, the community and tradition, and, secondly, all that is linked to the state and legal rights, but also to modern normativity, which includes a positive emphasis on democracy, civil society, and human rights. These two spheres are not distinct but are entangled in many and changeable ways, creating a complex space of negotiation of authority and legitimacy. Behind all this, one might see another, specific and well-known Malagasy cultural pattern of thinking and acting effective. The ‘old,’ that is, premodern (but still very much alive and constantly adapted or ‘invented’) worldview of the island population has been convincingly described as based on the assumption of a hierarchized, very complex, and 3  Since the election of President Andry Rajoelina in January 2019, though, cattle rustling, and banditry has become far less important, following a situation of rare political unity. Madagascar appears at present (February 2021) in this respect as a largely pacified country.

328 

P. KNEITZ

difficult-to-control cosmos of interplaying and concurrent forces, including many kinds of transcendental entities (Bloch 1986, pp.  279–282; Delivré 1974, pp. 147–157; Graeber 2007, pp. 35–38). Part of this general vision is the belief that each human has a given and unique inner capacity (hasina) to manipulate these forces to arrive at their aims and to influence their destiny (vintana), that is, for rising to a higher hierarchical level of importance relative to the status of other individuals of the given social cosmos. The capacity to link effectively to different kinds of legitimacies and authorities should be seen as part of the cultural toolbox of local actors in the Bongolava region. Another important aspect is the accentuated importance of a normativity of mutual aid and solidarity (fihavanana gasy), which is one of the main forces of the exceptional stability of Malagasy society in past decades, and its capacity to prevent the deterioration of conflicts into physical violence and net rupture (Kneitz 2016). In fact, the idea of an original and ‘traditional’ Malagasy value of solidarity developed during twentieth century as a marker of identity vis-à-vis the trends of modernization and secularization. To put it differently, one might say that various cultural trends and codes for dealing with authority and legitimacy are meeting within the ongoing process of modernization, leading again to a variety of outcomes: the distinct registers can overlap, they might be blended or stay in distinct spheres, among others. The following ethnographic example will allow for a more precise understanding of this general framework.

4   Insecurity, Corruption, and the Question of Authority in the Bongolava Region The aim of this and the following sections are to introduce an ethnographic situation relevant for the central problem of insecurity, the dynamic of solution-finding and the related process of negotiating—and challenging—authority in the area of my case study. The region4 called Bongolava, literally meaning ‘long mountains,’ is situated about 150 kilometers to the west of the capital, Antananarivo. It is an intermediary, hilly region between the highlands and the coast, mostly consisting of grasslands, and until a few decades ago only sparsely populated. Tsiroanomandidy, 4  A ‘region’ (région, faritra) is a main administrative territorial level in Madagascar, situated directly below the national government. The Malagasy territory is divided into 22 (since 2021: 23) regions.

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

329

a town of about 30,000 people and the urban center of the region, is one of the most important trading markets for cattle in Madagascar. I will start with a short remark on the methodology used. 4.1  Methodological Note The majority of the empirical data presented was collected during a two-­ year stay in Madagascar (11/2016–1/2019). The study on vigilantes and village conventions included six periods of fieldwork (about two weeks each) in three regions: the Bongolava, the Vakinankaratra, and the Menabe. Data collected during previous stays in the Melaky region (between 2010 and 2013) also contributed to assessing the villagers’ responses to insecurity. A main focus was on the Bongolava region, though; more precisely, the area near the town of Tsiroanomandidy. The research investigated structures of local self-defense, with the so-called dina, a kind of popular law, as a main aspect. It was only during my stays that I became aware of the existence of new kinds of vigilante groups as well, such associations working within the idea of a civil society. Formal and informal interviews were conducted—sometimes in Antananarivo— with villagers, members of the two vigilante organizations (Lambamena, Zazamainty), functionaries, and politicians. Insecurity was a main topic during the time of my stay, resulting in much coverage in media (newspapers, radio or TV discussions, political rhetoric and military actions), and making up the general agenda of public security forces. 4.2  Negotiating Legitimacy and Authority in the Bongolava Since 2009 The Bongolava region was affected by the events sketched earlier, particularly by heightening levels of insecurity after 2009. These problems were discussed and expressed at many local, regional, or national levels, and by using different instruments. Among the concrete actions undertaken, to give just an example of the diversity of possibilities at hand, was the creation of a citizen’s rights association called FIVATO, that is, FIarahamientan’ny Vondron’olon’Afaka Tompon Andraikiatra (‘Active Solidarity of the Sacred-Responsible Citizen’), by a local activist and politician, who offered his services to the local population for complaining against different forms of corruption (Statut Fivato 2018). In the following, a particular important reaction will be discussed in more detail, which

330 

P. KNEITZ

started to become visible after 2011 and which is a predecessor of the vigilante groups: the creation of so-called village conventions, or, in the Malagasy language, dina. A dina is essentially a self-invented form of regulation, and a related social structure, created by a local group, usually one or several villages, serving to organize all kinds of tasks and problems existing in the respective locality (Imbiki 2011). Problems of security are a well-established cause, among many others, for the creation of a village convention. In such a case, a dina often takes on the form of a list of punishments, which are enforced by a specially designed dina association or task force. The idea of dina or village conventions is traceable to the beginning of the nineteenth century in central Madagascar, when it was part of the internal politics of the kingdom of Merina, founded by King Andrianampoinimerina (ca. 1745–1810). As an independent or grass-roots regulation, a contemporary dina implies the possibility of questioning the dominant legitimacy. As will become clear further, this danger has been clearly recognized by the authorities of the modern Malagasy state. The recent creation of dina to fight insecurity in the Bongolava was inspired by the establishment of successful dina on the western coast since 2009. In the Bongolava region, the establishment of new dina regulations immediately took a more political turn. In fact, the creation of the dina was not a movement from below, but rather from above: Two opposing deputies were behind the elaboration of two competitive dina structures around 2012. One, called Dina Avotra (‘Rescued’), was created by the deputy Harison Raholijaona (in 2012, an independent deputy; later a member of HVM, the presidential party between 2013 and 2018). The other, called Dina Tambatra (‘United’), was backed by the deputy Hajanirina Ramaherijaona (in 2012 adhering to the presidential party TGV). Both competing regulations were soon homologated and thereby officialized, as it is prescribed by law, by the court of first instance of Tsiroanomandidy in 2014. The homologation is a process of legalization of those dina which aim to solve the problem of public disorder and insecurity. It was introduced by a law in 2001 (Loi 2001). One main effect of a homologation is that a legal condemnation of caught persons by the dina itself becomes impossible. The danger of an emergence of a new kind of legitimacy and authority was thereby banned legally, as well as the problem of arbitrary actions by villagers and vigilantes. The latter, though, continues covertly, as it is an open secret in rural areas, and as later critics by national and international

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

331

advocates of human rights, including Amnesty International (Amnesty International 2017) revealed. From 2014 onward, the new homologated dina structures were implemented in most villages of the Bongolava region, sometimes both dina variations, with the Dina Tambatra as the more successful. The year 2016, though, brought about a dysfunctional dina in the Bongolava, and in consequence, further disruption and disorder, as insecurity by cattle rustlers recurred. Three main and complementary problems are identifiable. The main cause  was probably  the aforementioned integration of dina conventions into the state through homologation. An important complaint of the local population was that the requirement to deliver seized bandits to state security forces and courts was counterproductive. Corruption would allow bandits to buy their way out of prison easily, meaning that all efforts to catch bandits became useless. The integration of the ‘savage’ dina structures into the state by homologation, then, contributed to their inefficiency. A second problem was, quite surprisingly on first sight, the momentary success of the dina itself. The calming down of the region due to a functioning village convention meant a lower number of bandits caught and cattle stolen. This, again, meant, according to local informants (including a deputy), less income for corrupt state functionaries, and an increase in the costs of cattle, as there were no cheap stolen cattle available. Consequently, state functionaries and cattle sellers are said to have worked toward the dysfunctionality of the dina regulations. This difficult-to-verify logic of the local dynamic regarding security is, therefore, much more complex: While order might be a main public goal, it is disorder which is silently preferred by those groups and individuals profiting from it. A third problem was internal fighting about money and abuse of power within the dina structures. This difficult situation pushed the rural population, since the beginning of 2017, to look for another solution. The population of the village Ankitsikitsika, as mentioned in the introduction, opted, this time, to try the new possibility of adhering to one of the developing vigilante groups.

5   A Magic Momentum In this chapter, I will show how vigilante groups were able to establish themselves recently as actors for restoring public order in the Bongolava region and far beyond. Their ability to do so is legitimated, I will argue, by their knowledge of manipulating sacredness, on the one hand, and the

332 

P. KNEITZ

incapacity of the state to provide security, on the other. From the villagers’ point of view, the different registers of public or vigilante authority are not perceived as opposites but as concurrent options for manipulating the world. 5.1  The ‘Children of Black’ and the ‘Red Scarfs’ Vigilantism in Madagascar is a very well anchored but not much known phenomenon and was until now never chosen as subject to systemic research and appears only occasionally in academic works (see, for example, Rasamoelina 2007, or Scheidecker 2016). Villagers, as has been noted earlier, always have been forced to think about their own protection and continued to do so when more comprehensive political structures became established. Clearly, they felt that doing so was an expression of a natural right to protect themselves in periods of heightened insecurity. The vigilante groups presented in the following paragraphs are different from this kind of group and territorial-based approach, as they were founded by an individual leader and operate on a greater, interregional level, aspiring even to national notoriety. While the new vigilante groups are offering their service based on their capacity to push back brigands, village people feel entitled to make use of vigilantes’ assistance, and to question thereby indirectly public authority, because in their experience the state can’t keep the promise of order. In about 2016, two new vigilante groups gained notoriety in the Bongolava region: the so-called Zazamainty and Lambamena (see Fig. 1). Both names are related, among others, to the obvious physical attribute of a black or red scarf slung around the head (see Figs. 2 and 3).5 This appearance takes up the iconography of warriors in precolonial times, which might be used as well by the cattle rustlers. To present oneself as a ‘Child of the Black’ further entails the meaning of the protection of the respective vigilante by the magic forces hidden behind the black scarf, mostly in the form of amulets, playing on the common image of a child-parent relationship.6 5  The name Lambamena refers as well to the prestigious and expensive Lambamena burial cloth, a symbol of honor and pride in central Madagascar. 6  That constellation—black scarf/magic—probably, according to my informants, has a deeper meaning, linking the color black with nature spirits. It is, though, certainly unrelated to the European/Western notion of ‘black magic.’

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

333

Fig. 1  Distribution of the vigilantes Lambamena and Zazamainty in mid-­western Madagascar

The vigilante groups have developed very rapidly since 2015 and 2016 and gained prominence in most parts of rural middle-western Madagascar, today roughly encompassing a distance of about 800 kilometers from Ilakaka in the south to Maevatanana in the northwest (Map 1). It is very difficult to precisely measure the number of adherents, but as they are present nowadays in many, if not most, villages of the mentioned vast area, a figure of about 10,000 seems a low estimate, with the Lambamena more

334 

P. KNEITZ

Fig. 2  Zazamainty near the village Andranomadio, March 2018 (Photo by the author)

important in absolute figures. While the two vigilante groups are quite different in respect to their ideological backgrounds, in their practice and appearance, they share many fundamental features. Both groups were founded by charismatic leaders. The Zazamainty association was created by a man called Rasoanaivo, perhaps about 50 years old in 2015, when this group began to develop in the Menabe and Vakinankaratra regions in the southern and southwestern Bongolava. The founding personality of the Lambamena, or of the Jesoa Kristy Fandresana Lambamena (‘The Red Scarfs/The Lambamena burial cloths of the Triumphant Jesus Christ’), as their exact name was until 2019,7 is Martin 7  In 2019, the name was abrogated to the more neutral expression Fandresana Lambamena (or ‘Triumphant Red Scarfs’), following the demand of state authority to avoid a religious

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

335

Fig. 3  The Lambamena of the village Antanetibe, April 28, 2018 (Photo by the author)

Ramboanarivo, probably between 30 and 35 years old in 2018, and born in the village of Ambatonikia, near the town of Betafo (region Vakinankaratra). Whereas Rasoanaivo has long worked as a healer or magician (mpiamasy), Ramboanarivo, from a very humble background, was shaped by a long experience of visions, trances, and spirit possession of, at first, two  Malagasy Catholic sisters, who assigned him, according to his belief, the task to help the Malagasy population and to free them from the plague of bandits. Interest in these men, and the service of defending the villages against insecurity they proposed, began to rise by observation of their actions itself. As both men succeeded respectively, together with their assistants, to win battles against the dahalo or mavo (bandits) in a way perceived as rather miraculous, the local population began to trust them. The reputation of the Zazamainty, for example, began to grow in 2015, when only seven vigilantes triumphed against a group of about 45 bandits who had stolen about 100 zebu cattle near the town of Betafo (Vakinankaratra

link, as part of the administrative process of inscription into the list of official recognized associations.

336 

P. KNEITZ

region). The question of authority and legitimacy is indirectly evoked by the way such violent events are presented: They [the bandits] fired but their cartridges once fired became smoke, or immediately became smoke. […] Their boss was encircled by three of us Zazamainty, while the others were still fighting. The firearms of the bandits weren’t able to shoot anymore; without knowing why, they were blocked. The three Zazamainty took the firearm of the boss and killed him. As the other bandits saw that, they fled […]. (Report by Toky, an initiator, February 2018)

The vigilantes were victorious not only because they applied a superior strategy or because they are capable warriors, this story suggests, but because they were supported by magic forces: the cartridges of the bandits just ‘became smoke’ or the firearms were ‘blocked’ by mysterious, not explicitly named forces. Rasoanaivo appears, therefore, as somebody who is able to manipulate some kind of magic power, or to ally such powers to his cause. This kind of reasoning is nothing exceptional, but very common among the Malagasy population: nearly all kinds of events within a given community are explained by an entanglement of the empiric world with magic forces, which are possibly manipulated by individuals. Before further investigating the question of authority and related legitimacy, it is illuminating to know more details about the development, the structures, the ideology, and the working of the two vigilante groups. Rasoanaivo, founder of the Zazamainty, like Ramboanarivo from the Lambamena, first gained prominence near the towns of Mandoto and Betafo, in the western part of the Vakinankaratra region. At the end of 2016, though, the deputy Harison Raholijaona invited Rasoanaivo to his circumscription in the Bongolava region. He offered him a house in the village of Andranomadio, near the town of Tsiroanomandidy, as a center for his activities to restore security for the local population. Raholijaona assisted further by creating the Association of Traditional and Contemporary Security (Société de la Sécurité Traditionelle et Contemporaine, SSTC) as a way to register all kinds of vigilante groups and to connect them thereby to the state. This is expressed by issuing badges (see Fig.  4). At about the same time, villages to the east of Tsiroanomandidy began to invite delegates of the Lambamena, which resulted in the implementation of vigilante groups, following the formation of villagers. Since 2017, then, both groups have been working in the

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

337

Fig. 4  Badge issued by the SSTC (Photo by the author)

Bongolava region. As adherence to a vigilante group is an individual decision, in some villages both Zazamainty and Lambamena are present. In most villages, though, only one vigilante association is active. Within both vigilante groups, the link to sacredness or transcendental forces plays a very important role. It is the founding principle of the respective groups, improving internal cohesion and central to their formation, while reflections on military tactics, equipment, or overall strategy appear secondary and less prominent. The groups are very different in their appearance and ideological foundations, their actions and their perceptions are based on a similar cultural grammar: that magic forces are a real part of the empiric world, and that it is possible to become connected to these forces and to manipulate them for one’s own profit. The Zazamainty appears to be the more conservative or traditional group, following a well-established code of practice and belief in magical forces in rural areas. They invoke the power of nature spirits (zanahary) from all four cardinal directions, that is, the totality of nature spirits, but

338 

P. KNEITZ

more specifically spirits related to the southeast and west, like the kokolampy or atsimo-tany, including an enumeration of the spirits of mountains and rivers of these regions (initiation on March 19, 2018, of a vigilante by one of Rasoanaivo’s sons in Andranomadio). Rasoanaivo insisted upon the importance of special magic charms he brought from Nosy Varika, a town on the southeast coast. These charms, invented and tested at the occasion of the 1947 insurrection against the French, were thought to be particularly effective to fight against bandits.8 The future Zazamainty receive several charms.9 Some of the charms are fixed and hidden within the black scarf. Others are stored in a cow horn (mohara) which is fixed to a cord and worn around the neck (see Fig. 5), a way to wear charms known since the beginning of the eighteenth century, but probably a custom going back much longer in history. Their arms (usually sabers or daggers, rarely firearms) and their bodies are marked regularly by white points (tany ravo) using chalk, a well-established way to signal a blessing.10 All adherents also have to recognize certain internal regulations, including the interdiction to “terrorize people on the street in a village or town” (Fitsipika 2017, art. 1),

Fig. 5  Two Zazamainty, village Andriambe, November 2017 (Photo by the author)  Interview with Rasoanaivo, March 1, 2018 (Andranomadio).  This was not part of the initiation ritual I attended. 10  Initiation ritual on March 19, 2018. 8 9

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

339

and they should observe a list of about 80 interdictions or taboos (fady), which include “not to eat pork meat” or not  to let “their clothing be washed by a woman.” In case of a defeat or other kind of problems or misfortune, the transgressing of the fady usually serves as an explanative cause. These kinds of practices are well-analyzed elements of the Malagasy cultural world over the past centuries. The world of the Lambamena, however, seems at first very different as it is firmly linked to Catholic Christian belief, at least with regard to some prominent elements. Their prayers, for examples, address “the Holiness the Pope,” “the Diocese Antsirabe,” “the sisters Robine, Clémentine and Safidy,” as well as “Jesus Christ the Conqueror,” or include the famous formula “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen” (prayer by Ramboanarivo, during an initiation on May 26, 2018, in Ambatonikia). Other Christian elements include the presence of a rosary (sapilet) or small bottles of holy water (rano masina), or the importance of the ten holy commandments of God and the use of symbols like the crucifix, the bible or St. George, visible on the special badges of the Lambamena (see Fig. 6). All these aspects, including the very serious and fervent way Christian faith seems at stake, cannot hide the fact that the overall approach to the world by the Lambamena is essentially characterized by magic, and should much more be understood as another variant of an older Malagasy pattern of belief in magic, used as well by the Zazamainty. At the same time, it is a fascinating example of syncretism, with two overlapping meanings and simultaneous messages. In fact, the Christian elements are quite obviously layered over the blank space left by the dispersing of more conventional Malagasy cultural elements. The place of the nature spirits is, for example, occupied in the prayers of the Lambamena by the Pope or the Diocese Antsirabe, and the rosary or the holy water or the pig bones replace charms. The magical ideas related to the holy water, for example, become even more apparent by the fact that special plants are soaked in the water, contributing thereby to the protection of the vigilantes, in a way analogous to the use of plants in more traditional magic practices. Other, original, and more explicitly magical elements are added, however, including needles (fanjaitra). They are used during the initiations to pierce the skin of the initiand on several locations on the face, neck, upper body, or legs, serving to create a protection against bullets. Needles would be worn as well when in action, with the same idea of protection as mentioned before. The Menalamba would usually fix small pig or cow bones underneath the

340 

P. KNEITZ

Fig. 6  Badge of a Lambamena, village Marovavy, March 21, 2018 (Photo by the author)

red scarf, analogous to the charms used by the Zazamainty. Other magical instruments include mirrors (fitaratra), which are worn regularly on the forehead, the back of the head and the breast (see Fig.  7). They are regarded as a main arm, in addition to more standard arms like self-­ produced sabers or daggers, as they are believed to create dizziness when directed toward enemies. All arms are regularly sprinkled with holy water, with a meaning similar to the application of white color to the arms of the Zazamainty. The sudden success of the rival vigilante groups and their magical worldview is related to the experience of a problematic state. Villagers principally acknowledge the power of the state, and the normative ideas behind it, but they feel forced to turn to sacred authority as it manifests through the actions of the vigilantes, as the state systematically failed to keep the promise of order. In such way, a magic momentum took place, that is, a valorization of magical practices and their underlying authority.

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

341

Fig. 7  Lambamena with their magic mirrors at the village Antsahatanteraka, April 25, 2018 (Photo by the author)

Now, based upon these empiric sketches of some elements of the social space of the Bongolava region, the central question can be approached: How is authority and legitimacy defined and understood in the given context? 5.2  The Meaning of Authority and Legitimacy in the Bongolava First of all, two main registers of authority are recognizable: on the one side, there is the legal state, including the underlying and connected global normativity of rationality, democracy, human rights, and civil society. On the other side, there is the idea of sacred authority, which implies many different manifestations of spirits and practices, such the nature spirits and possession cults. These registers may appear as distinct and opposite. In fact, they are intertwined in many and changeable ways through local actors who possibly choose to recognize, reject, or use such authority according to given circumstances. When the deputy Harison Raholijaona,

342 

P. KNEITZ

for example, invited the Zazamainty to join his circumscription in 2016, this involved the political authority of his status as deputy, his position as an influential politician, but it also shows his consciousness of the importance of sacred thinking within the local population. By the formal creation of a new legal entity, the SSTC, he helped to legalize the new vigilante groups and to connect them with the state, but in a far less regulated way in comparison with the dina. A second observation is that of a situation of concurrent principles between the two forms of authority, and again within each register. The Zazamainty and Lambamena are as much in a potential, and occasionally real, situation of competivity as the two dina of the Bongolava, the civil society associations, the diversity of institutions of the state, or the more hidden power constellations of the socioeconomic elite. The modern state, however, is in an obviously advantageous situation with respect to the stakeholders of tradition. The actors connected to it try consciously to intervene against any kind of possible challenge, as the case of emergence of the dina conventions, and their subsequent deterioration showed. In consequence, authority is never fixed to any individual actor but can be gained and lost. Third, the two registers of authority are necessarily accepted by local actors as part of a given situation of power. They try, though, to develop, adapt, or negotiate them according their individual or communal context and interests, including the possibility of a creative invention, as the case of the Christian magic practice of the Lambamena has shown. Most importantly, I argue that the intrusion of modern state authority and global normativity does not change, at least for the moment, the long-established Malagasy pattern of seeing the world as driven by rivalrous forces used by actors to reach a higher hierarchical level in the given social space. Malagasy actors are very able to act within a world of plural legitimacies and authorities, rather than selecting an exclusive legitimacy. The legal state, according to this emic view, is just another variation and its authority is integrated in this way to local conceptions.

6   Conclusion As one might have expected, the two main modes of authority at hand in the Bongolava region—that based upon modern normativity and global knowledge on the one hand and that based upon local authority on the other—are locally appropriated and arranged. Two causes have

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

343

prominently fueled the dynamic process of negotiating authority in recent years: insecurity and existential threat on the one hand, and the inability or even unwillingness of the state to act against disorder on the other hand. State authority and the connected global normativity of the legal state, democracy, peacemaking, or civil society are admittedly in an advantageous position, as it is connected to superior sources and capital. Local expressions of authority, however, are relevant as they offer, among other things, a refuge beyond the state, as long as the promise of a state-based order remains futile, or only partly or occasionally fulfilled. At the same time, from a local point of view, the different registers of authority are blended into a long-standing cultural pattern of viewing society (and the world) as part of a hierarchical structure, with an ongoing competition between all individual or social actors to rise to superior levels relative to others. The possibility of plural, parallel, and competing authorities is part of such worldview, allowing to interpret the arriving of modern or global normativity by local actors as just another register or mode of power, and not as cultural break. When the inhabitants of the village Ankitsikitsika described in the introductory piece decided on the Zazamainty, they did not opt, as one might at first understand, for a revival of traditional authority. Instead, they used an available option which seemed to best serve their interests in the given situation, while, at the same time, the legitimacy of the state remains uncontested. In other words, the cultural pattern interiorized allows a non-categoric, plural, open and simultaneous approach to authority, of advantage in this period of accelerated transformation in Madagascar.

References Akude, Johen / Daun, Anna / Egner, David / Lambach, Daniel (Eds.) (2011). Politische Herrschaft jenseits des Staates: Zur Transformation von Legitimität in Geschichte und Gegenwart. VS: Wiesbaden. Amnesty International (2017). Madagascar: Reverse the Humanity Rights Downward Spiral. Retrieved from: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ news/2017/07/madagascar-­reverse-­the-­human-­rights-­downward-­spiral/. Bayart, Jean-François (1989). The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London: Longman. Beaujard, Philippe (2012). Les mondes de l’Océan Indien, Vol. 2: L’océan Indien, au cœur des globalisation de l’Ancient Monde, 7e-15e siècle. Paris: Colin.

344 

P. KNEITZ

Bloch, Maurice (1986). La séparation du pouvoir et du rang comme processus d’évolution: Une esquisse du développement des royautés dans le centre de Madagascar. In: Raison-Jourde, Françoise (Ed.), L’histoire royale et ses résurgence contemporaines. Paris: Karthala, pp. 265–298. Chabal, Patrick (1999). Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Oxford: Currey. Comaroff, John L. / Comaroff, Jean (2006). Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago, IL: Chicago Press. Delivré, Alain (1974). L’histoire des rois d’Imerina. Interprétation d’une tradition orale. Paris: Klincksieck. Duffy, Rosaleen (2007). Gemstone Mining in Madagascar: Transnational Networks, Criminalization and Global Integration. In: Journal of Modern African Studies, 45 (2), pp. 185–206. Englebert, Pierre / Tull, Denis (2008). Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa: Flawed Ideas About Failed States. In: International Security, 32 (4), pp. 106–139. Fitsipika (2017): Fitsipika anaty ny zazamainty, i.e. Interior statue of the Zazamainty. (Private Archive of Rasoanaivo, president of the Zazamainty, Mandoto and Antanetibe). Flacourt, Étienne (1661). Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar. Troyes: Oudot. Galibert, Didier (2009). Les gens du pouvoir à Madagascar: État postcolonial, légitimités et territoire (1956–2002). Paris: Karthala. Graeber, David (2007). Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric / Ranger, Terence O. (Eds.) (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Imbiki, Anaclet (2011). Le fokonolona et le dina: institutions traditionnelles modernisées au service de la sécurité publique et de la justice populaire à Madagascar. Antananarivo: Jurid’ika. Kirsch, Thomas / Grätz, Thilo (Eds.) (2010). Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa. Suffolk: Byodell. Klute, Georg / Bellagamba, Alice (2008). Tracing Emergent Powers in Contemporary Africa  – Introduction. In: Bellagamba, Alice / Klute, Georg (Eds.), Beside the State: Emergent Powers in Contemporary Africa. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, pp. 7–22. Kneitz, Peter (2016). Introduction: La paix du fihavanana. In: Kneitz, Peter (Ed.), Fihavanana  – La vision d’une société paisible à Madagascar. Halle: Universitätsverlag, pp. 15–72. Les Nouvelles (2016). Lutte contre l’insécurité: l’Usad, officiellement active à Mahabo. Retrieved from: https://www.newsmada.com/2016/06/20/ lutte-­contre-­linsecurite-­lusad-­officiellement-­active-­a-­mahabo/.

  A MAGIC MOMENTUM 

345

L’Express (2018). Vol de bœufs – La chasse aux dahalo fait quatre mille morts. Retrieved from: https://lexpress.mg/23/06/2018/vol-de-boeufs-la-chasseaux-dahalo-fait-­quatre-­mille-­morts/. Loi (2001). Loi n° 2001-004 du 25 octobre 2001 portant réglementation générale des Dina en matière de sécurité publique (J.O. n° 2746 du 19.11.2001, p. 3047). [Government of the Republic of Madagascar, Antananarivo]. Lund, Christian (2007). Twilight Institutions: An Introduction. In: Lund, Christian (Ed.), Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics in Africa. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Mediapart (2019). Madagascar: le vol de zébus vire au meurtre de masse. Retrieved from: https://www.mediapart.fr/studioa/portfolios/madagascar-­le-­vol-­de-­ zebus-­vire-­au-­meurtre-­de-­masse.html. Pellerin, Matthieu (2017). Madagascar face à la criminalité multiforme: Notes de l’Ifri. Paris: Ifri. Radimilahy, Chantal / Crossland, Zoë (2015). Indian Ocean Dynamics and Archeological Histories. In: Azania: Archeological Research in Africa, 50 (4), pp. 495–518. Rasamoelina, Henri (2007). Madagascar: état, communautés villageoises et banditisme rural. L’exemple du vol de bœufs dans la Haute-Matisatra. Paris: L’Harmattan. Razafindrakoto, Mireille / Roubaud, François / Wachsberger, Jean-Michel (2017). L’énigme et le paradoxe: Économie politique de Madagascar. Marseille: IRD. Reno, William (2000). Shadow States and the Political Economy of Civil Wars. In: Berdal, Mats / Malone, David (Eds.), Greed and Grievance: Economy Agendas in Civil Wars. Boulder, CO: Rienner, pp. 43–68. Scheidecker, Gabriel (2016). Cattle, Conflicts, and Gendarmes in Southern Madagascar: A Local Perspective on Fihavanana Gasy. In: Kneitz, Peter (Ed.), Fihavanana  – La vision d’une société paisible à Madagascar. Halle: Universitätsverlag, pp. 129–156. Statut Fivato (2018). Statut du Fivato: FIarahamientan’ny Vondron’olon’Afaka Tompon Andraikiatra. (Private Archive of Ramandriana Philémon Andriamamdandry, Antsahatanteraka). Tribune.com (2016). La première Unité Spéciale Anti-Dahalo, installée. Retrieved from: https://www.madagascar-­tribune.com/La-­premiere-­Unite-­Speciale-­ Anti,22194.html. Tribune.com (2012). “On ne connaît pas on visage”. Retrieved from: https:// www.madagascar-­tribune.com/On-­ne-­connait-­pas-­son-­visage,17587.html. Weber, Max (1972). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. (First published in 1922) Tübingen: Mohr. Wright, Henry (Ed.) (2007). Early State Formation in Central Madagascar: An Archeological Survey of Western Avaradrano. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.

Ungoverned Spaces and Informalization of Violence: The Case of Kenya Police Reservists (KPRs) in Baragoi Willis Okumu and Eric Mutisya Kioko

1   Introduction The Kenya Police Reserve (KPR) was established in 1948 as a volunteer unit. It was originally called the Kenya Home Guards (KHG) mandated to “assist the regular police in the maintenance of law and order” (Mutsotso 2018, p.  81). Initially, reservists were mostly European colonial settlers who were armed by the state and called upon from time to time to help with policing duties (Mkutu 2015; Mkutu and Wandera 2013; Mutsotso 2018). At the height of the Mau Mau rebellion in the late 1950s, the Kenya Police Reserves Air Wing (KPRW) was used by the colonial government to reinforce its offensive effort against the Mau Mau (Mkutu 2015).

W. Okumu (*) Anglican Development Services, Nairobi, Kenya E. M. Kioko Department of Environmental Studies and Community Development, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_13

347

348 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

Archival documents1 show that colonial administrators recruited morans as government askaris. The askaris served as auxiliary forces, supplementing the colonial army efforts of raiding and weakening resisting ethnic groups. After independence in 1963, such volunteers became the link between government local chiefs and the communities. They provided surveillance at the grassroots level and acted on behalf of formal authority to prevent charcoal burning, logging, and to maintain law and order. Community members not only feared them, but also obeyed them. They were the eyes of local chiefs and, by extension, the state, on the ground. Following increasing crime in northern Kenya in the early 1980s including armed interethnic cattle raids2 and ethnicized politics with the potential to spur violent conflicts as well as inter-/intra-clan disputes, the state resorted to recruiting volunteers with jurisdiction in specific local areas. Since the early 1980s, the idea of KPR as an alternative to direct state policing was seen as a viable option aimed at meeting the security needs of local communities in historically marginalized pastoralist lands at minimum cost. Consequently, the deployment of KPRs as key policing unit in Northern Kenya has been described as “security on the cheap” owing to the voluntary nature of the job (Mkutu and Wandera 2013, p. 14). Their recruitment is based on their knowledge of the arid pastoralists’ terrains (Mkutu 2015) and the assumption that their existence in dangerous violent environments occasioned by rampant violent raids and interethnic conflict equips them with the skills of handling and using guns. However, this state-sanctioned force has increasingly become independent from the state, rising into an ethnic/clan-based lethal weapon that uses state guns against citizens and the state. In this chapter, we analyse the linkages between ungoverned spaces and the informalization of violence in Northern Kenya with reference to the state’s creation of the KPR. We ask, what is the role of the state in the ethnicization of the KPR institution as an alternative source of power and authority, and how do these powerful ethnic elements use the guns and ammunition provided to them by the state to promote and protect ethnic interests and to fight the very state? In so doing, we seek to analyse the institution of KPRs in its dual roles of community police vis-à-vis actors in

 Rhodes House, Oxford/Micr. Afri./515/Annual Report/1923–1924.  Raiding is used to mean violent seizure of livestock from another community, usually of a different ethnic group. 1 2

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

349

the ‘violent entrepreneurship’ that exists in ungoverned spaces of Northern Kenya (Abbink 2009). In the next section of the chapter, we briefly delve into the conceptual understanding of the institution of KPR as an alternative authority in the ungoverned spaces of Northern Kenya, linking it to discussions around state-community relationships regarding power and authority. Thereafter, we briefly describe the methodology used and then present an ethnographic example of the operations and atrocities of the KPR institution. The last part of the chapter will refer to the theory and case study to draw concluding remarks.

2   State-Community Relations: Ungoverned Spaces and Violent Entrepreneurship in Kenya The minimal presence of state structure within pastoralist rangelands of Eastern Africa has been a subject of great discussion (Bevan 2008; Matthysen et  al. 2010; Mulugeta and Hagmann 2008; Powel 2010). These studies have linked limited state presence evident in the incapacity or absence of adequate security personnel to protect the life and property of citizens with the frequency of violent raids. Due to the limited outreach of state security apparatus in Northern Kenya’s pastoral landscapes, scholars have described these areas as ‘ungoverned spaces’, arguing that the ineffectiveness of the state in these areas plays a significant role in violent conflicts that prevail (Mkutu 2015; Mkutu and Wandera 2013). Concepts such as ‘periphery’ have also been used to describe northern Kenya (s. Buchanan-Smith and Lind 2005, p. 4) due to the limited government presence, the inability of the government to maintain basic levels of security, as well as the historic economic and political marginalization that these areas have faced. Ungoverned spaces are therefore associated with marginalization. They are also seen as arenas for the production of violence as the absence of the state provides ample opportunity for non-state actors to engage in ‘violent entrepreneurship’ (Abbink 2009). Sharamo (2014, p.  4) described Northern Kenya as “bandit kingdom” due to the high levels of insecurity and lawlessness that pervade its geographical space and people. These scenarios show the state-community relationship that dots these marginal areas, where deprived citizens become a weapon against others and against the state. Here, the ‘weapons of the weak’ as described by

350 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

James Scott is no longer expressed in the form of everyday forms of resistance, but rather deliberate and targeted physical harm inflicted on the enemy—in this case, the state or citizens of other identities. Masuda (2009, p. 72) observes that guns are a violent device for social control, exploitation, and oppression found in marginal areas, where they are used in interethnic conflicts and in resistance to the state. In this case, the state is viewed as a ‘foreign predatory agency’ (i.e., an enemy), borrowing from the Ethiopian case (s. Tornay 2009, p. 86). Drawing examples from Ethiopia, Kurimoto and Simonse (1998) termed the neglect of pastoralist groups by states in Eastern Africa as state retreat. Sharamo (2014, p. 4) described Northern Kenya as “bandit kingdom” due to the high levels of insecurity and lawlessness that pervade its geographical space and people. Northern Kenya has been described as ‘Kenya’s Other Frontier’ (Menkhaus 2007). In his discussion of external conflicts among the Suri and its neighbours, Abbink (2009, p.  41) described the Suri settlement area as a “remote lowland region” far from the Ethiopian government. This further points to the idea of pastoralist spaces being ungoverned, located in the periphery of the state. Abbink (2009) attributed the inability of the Ethiopian state to monopolize the use of violence among the Suri to its distance from the Suri people. Distance here is not only geographical but also in terms of resource allocation priority. He associated state neglect of the Suri people with their indifference and ambivalence towards state directives from the security forces that from time to time were sent to quell violence within their neighbourhood (Abbink 2009). Linking ungoverned spaces, lawlessness, and the proliferation of small arms and light weapons, Masuda (2009, p. 72) argued that “guns are a violent device for social control, exploitation and oppression, and that they are found in marginal areas, where they are used in interethnic conflicts and in resistance to the state”. Writing about the Nyangatom’s perception of the Ethiopian state, Tornay (2009, p. 86) was informed that it was viewed as a “foreign predatory agency” far from the marginal lands of the Nyangatom; indifferent and unhelpful to their day-to-day struggles. Discussing the linkages between state neglect and violence in ungoverned pastoralist spaces, Sagawa stated: “There was no capacity or will to protect pastoral citizens in the border regions and these communities were forced to defend their own lives and property for many years” (2010, p. 103). Ungoverned spaces have been described as ‘brown areas’ where citizens experience ‘low intensity citizenship’ (O’Donnell 1993). ‘Brown areas’ in

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

351

most world maps indicate places with little state interest, lacking data on state development intervention programs. Lastly, ungoverned spaces have also been identified as arenas in which ‘shadow economies’ grow to fulfil the demand for public goods deprived from citizens through the retreat of the state (Idler and Forest 2015). The shadow economy that thrives in ungoverned spaces can be in the form of trade in illegal goods. The idea of arming locals in ungoverned spaces was adopted by the Ethiopian government in the 1990s (Sagawa 2010). Sagawa (2010) was informed of cases where government arms issued to the Ethiopian Police Reserves (EPRs) were used in mounting attacks against ‘favourite enemies’ of the Daasanach.3 In Northern Kenya, the ungoverned space left by the disinterested state created a huge demand for security, both personal and communal. This space has been filled by the Kenya Police Reservists. Given its own weak institutional framework, KPRs adopted a ‘quasi state-quasi non-­ state actor’ position to exploit the opportunities available in ungoverned spaces of Northern Kenya through violent entrepreneurship. The presence of KPRs as an alternative to state authority in the arid lands of Northern Kenya indicate the incapacity of the Kenyan state in the arid pastoralists’ lands of Baragoi. In effect, Northern Kenya is ungoverned space. Ken Menkhaus (2007, p.  3) defined ungoverned spaces as geographical areas with “weak or non-existent state authority”. Whelan (2006) stated that physical ungoverned spaces exist in remote borderland areas of the state. Menkhaus (2007, p.  3) further categorizes Northern Kenya and Uganda’s Karamoja region as ungoverned spaces owing to the ‘nominal’ presence of effective state authority in these regions. Menkhaus further expounds that ungoverned spaces are associated with high levels of insecurity, the presence of quasi-state security apparatus, and the existence of non-state actors who fill the vacuum vacated by the state in terms of security provision. Further, ungoverned spaces are marked by a huge presence of humanitarian agencies and the provision of relief food to locals (Menkhaus 2007). Rabasa et al. (2007) provided a framework for understanding and characterizing ungoverned spaces. They argue that ungoverned spaces must be 3  The violence that leads to killing of the ‘traditional’ or ‘favourite’ enemy is associated with the meritorious complex (Poissonnier 2010, p. 237). Among the Konso of Ethiopia, this implies that the killing of a ‘traditional’ or ‘favourite’ enemy is a means through which warriors gain recognition evident through scarification (the creation of markings on the chest, shoulder, and back as evidence of prowess at war and to convey that a person has killed the enemy in battle) and adoption of honorific titles.

352 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

understood in four dimensions: first is the extent of state presence in the society. By this, they imply that, if state presence in society is limited to the urban areas with better infrastructure and non-existent in the remote and distant borderlands, then those unpenetrated areas become the ungoverned spaces within the state. Second, ungoverned spaces can be seen in the extent to which the state enjoys monopoly of the instruments of violence in its territory. The existence of non-state actors who use or trade in instruments of violence in defiance of the state and the level of circulation of illegal small arms within particular regions show the existence of ungoverned spaces within the state. Third, the extent to which effective state authority can be put into use at international borders demonstrates the strength of that state authority. Ineffective state authority at the borders creates ungoverned spaces which are therefore rooms for the activity of non-state actors. Fourth, ungoverned spaces arise when governance of some parts or regions of the state are subject to intervention by another state.

3   Study Area and Methodology Samburu North (Baragoi) is located in the Northern part of Samburu County in Kenya. The Samburu pastoralist group, who make up about 78 per cent of its 67,000 population (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics 2019), mostly inhabit this area. The Turkana community make up 15 per cent of the population, while the remaining 7 per cent is shared between Somali, Meru, and Kikuyu, who are mostly located within Baragoi Town. The data presented here was collected in 2015. First, secondary data that comprise of police documents such as recordings from the Police Occurrence Book (known locally as OB) was collected and reviewed. This data covered a period between the years 2008–2013. Police Signals, which are documents sent from individual police stations to the National Police Headquarters when reporting a crime incident, covering the period between 2008 and 2013 were also collected and reviewed. Primary data collection involved 15 biographical interviews with purposively selected KPRs and former KPRs from the Samburu and Turkana communities. We further conducted 20 focus group discussions with KPRs in Baragoi, Tuum, Nachola, Bendera, Ngilai, Leilei, and Masikita villages in Samburu North Sub-County. The key theme in these discussions was on the process of recruitment, the benefits of being a KPR, and the personal experiences as KPRs as individuals and as members of

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

353

communities. We further conducted 44 interviews with several key informants including chiefs, police officers, moran leaders,4 elders, and retired chiefs. The goal of these key informant interviews was to understand the history of KPRs in Baragoi and how communities perceive their role. During the fieldwork, we also attended formal administrative and community security meetings organized by government officials popularly known as barazas, convened by chiefs from the Samburu and Turkana communities as well as by the office of the Deputy County Commissioner of Samburu North Sub-County in South Horr, Charda, Lenkima, Ngilai, Marti, Thuree, Baragoi town, Nachola, and Ngoriche hills. We obtained secondary data on violence incidences with a special focus on the role of KPRs in violent raids from 2005 to 2015 from Baragoi Police Station. These came in the form of Occurrence Book (OB) entries, police signals, and police chronology of events. Below is the map of the study area (Fig. 1).

4   History and the Institutional Structure of KPR in Kenya The Kenya Police Reserve was established in 1948 as a volunteer unit. It was originally called the Kenya Home Guards (KHG) mandated to “assist the regular police in the maintenance of law and order” (Mutsotso 2018, p. 81). Initially reservists were mostly European colonial settlers who were armed by the state and called upon from time to time to help with policing duties (Mkutu 2015; Mkutu and Wandera 2013; Mutsotso 2018). At the height of the Mau Mau rebellion in the late 1950s, the Kenya Police Reserves Air Wing (KPRW)5 was used by the colonial government to reinforce its offensive effort against the Mau Mau (Mkutu 2015). Archival documents (Rhodes House, Oxford/Micr. Afri./515/Annual Report/1923–1924) show that colonial administrators recruited morans as government askaris. The askaris served as auxiliary forces, supplementing the colonial army efforts of raiding and weakening resisting ethnic groups. According to Aridi (2013), KPRs were mostly found in areas 4  Morans are young men between the ages of 15 and 30 who, after circumcision, are charged with the responsibility of protecting communal and household livestock and property. 5  KPRW was made up of Former Royal Airforce pilots who used their aircraft for “communication, reconnaissance and light transport roles” (Ritchie 2011, p. 34).

354 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

Fig. 1  Map of the study area that represents Baragoi (Samburu North Sub-­ County) and indicates the locations (administrative units) of Samburu North Sub-­ County. (Illustration by the authors)

where police presence was limited and were charged with the responsibility of protecting cattle kraals as well as accompanying herders to ward off cattle rustlers. In Northern Kenya, KPRs emerged at the beginning of the Moi presidency in early 1980s. In an interview with a retired paramount chief in Samburu North, he stated: I am the one who started KPRs in this area. We wanted to address the issue of Ngoroko.6 We all had bows and arrows. I was the operation officer against 6  Ngoroko were armed cattle raiders from Turkana community composed of ex-military men and morans (Oba 1992, p. 8).

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

355

Ngoroko incursion in this area. I recruited Turkana morans to be trained as KPRs in 1980. Personally, I was issued with a gun by the state in 1980 due to frequent Ngoroko attacks in my location of Kawap. The training of KPRs was done in Maralal. At Kawap we had 20 KPRs, all were issued with guns by the government. In Marti we also had 20 KPRs. At that time KPRs used to follow orders. Their job was to prevent raids, they had more authority than Administration Police, they could arrest any offender. (Interview February 2015, Natiti Village)

In an interview with the retired Paramount Chief of the Turkana of Baragoi, he stated that his first recruits into the KPR were “morans, ex-­ police, tribal police and those who knew how to handle guns”.7 In another interview with a serving Assistant Chief from the Samburu community,8 we were informed that for one to be selected as a KPR, the person had to “be a moran of good character who owns livestock, disciplined, must not be a thief and must be a person who obeys law and order”. A Samburu Sergeant of the KPR recalled how he was recruited into the service in the early 1990s: I was recruited into KPR when I was still a moran. I was recruited by Chief Lomedero of Baragoi town. During that time there were too many wars and many people were acquiring guns. I was issued with a MKIV rifle. During that time KPRs mostly had MK1 and MKIV rifles. In my first war, Rendille cattle were raided by Turkana in Soito el Kokoyo when Rendille herders moved to the area for grazing during the drought. Those days we used to be given 50 bullets and we would finish them in two days. There were too many wars. (Interview January 2015, Baragoi town)

5   From Kenya Police Reserves to National Police Reserves (NPRs) The National Police Reserve (NPR) Policy Framework (Government of Kenya 2013) provides for the formation of the National Police Reserve Unit, the successor to the Kenya Police Reserve, on the terms that “the Unit must be headed by an officer not below the rank of Assistant Inspector-General who is the Director; a Deputy Director and such other staff as the management of the Reserve may require. The Unit should be 7 8

 Interview February 2015, Natiti village.  Interview October 2014, Baragoi AP Camp.

356 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

located in the Office of the Inspector General” (Government of Kenya 2013, p. 6). The policy guideline proposes the creation of the position of Director of National Police Reserves to report to the Inspector General of Police and mandated to undertake general administration, “training and efficiency of the Reserve personnel in liaison with the respective County Formations” (Government of Kenya 2013, p. 7). It further proposes the appointment of a Reserve Officer in every County to be in charge of National Police Reserves within that county. These officers would then report to the Director of Police Reserves who subsequently reports to the Inspector General of Police. The National Police Reserve Policy Framework (Government of Kenya 2013) describes the rules of engagement between the Kenyan state and its citizens in Northern Kenya who wish to enlist as reserves in the following terms: A Reserve police officer must serve voluntarily and should not be entitled to claim any remuneration for his/her services but while undergoing and performing duties should be paid such allowances as may be prescribed for a police officer of corresponding rank and seniority in such rank. (Government of Kenya 2013, p. 9)

While this offer of payment of allowances may be seen as an improvement, the notion of a volunteer force, armed by the state, lends credence to reserves being ‘security on the cheap’ and enables their further manipulation by non-state actors as an alternative authority within the Kenyan state.

6   KPRs and the Informalization of Violence in Northern Kenya Table 1 provides data on the numbers of KPRs and the firearms issued in Baragoi (Samburu North Sub-County). The Kenya Human Rights Commission (2010) linked the culture of raiding and increased violence among pastoralists in Northern Kenya to the historical socio-economic and political marginalization of pastoralist groups in Northern Kenya. The existence of KPRs as a policing unit in Northern Kenya represents an aspect of that historical marginalization as well as the state’s contribution to the informalization of violence through the recruitment and arming of volunteer villagers to provide security for themselves on behalf of the state. Schilling et  al. (2012) associated the recruitment of warriors for commercialized raiding among pastoralists in

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

357

Table 1  Data on KPRs and their firearms in Samburu North Sub-County Administrative area (Location)

Inhabitant community

South Horr Tuum Ndoto Waso Rongai Arsim Suiyan El Barta Latakweny Baragoi Kawap

Samburu Samburu Samburu Samburu Samburu Samburu Samburu Samburu Samburu and Turkana Turkana (now displaced and living at Lenkima village) Turkana Turkana Turkana

Parkati Nachola Marti Total number of KPRs

Number of KPRs

Guns

61 32 44 26 16 44 64 23 33 15

61 32 45 28 16 44 64 23 37 15

12 27 16 413

12 26 17 420

National Police Service (2013a)

Northern Kenya with a lack of opportunities occasioned by very low literacy levels among young males in Northern Kenya. They further argued that the limited presence of the state in Northern Kenya encourages the presence of other non-state actors such as gun merchants who sell weapons to pastoralists. The insecurity, occasioned by the absence of state security, forces pastoralists to provide or guarantee their own security through the acquisition of weapons for defensive and aggressive purposes. Enlisting as KPRs therefore provides an avenue through which locals can access guns and ammunition legitimately as state security officers which they can equally use for illegitimate purposes such as cattle raids and highway banditries. Being a KPR therefore legitimates the ownership of state-issued arms and ammunition for one’s convenience and unsupervised use. Being a KPR therefore further provides a window through which an individual can gain power as the owner of a gun, thus enabling him to defend his family and livestock as well as to contribute to communal efforts in aggression and defence duties. Ownership of state-issued firearms and ammunition provides power from an emic perspective. To the local Samburu and Turkana communities, a KPR is a position of privilege as it bestows legitimacy on ownership of instruments of violence. It further gives the KPR a

358 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

responsibility to protect his livestock and property in addition to protecting the communal property, including livestock and boundaries. State neglect of Northern Kenya can be seen in its incapacity to allocate resources in education, health, and security sectors in the arid areas occupied by pastoralists. The limited presence of the state and the history of past wars in surrounding areas of Northern Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, and South Sudan have been blamed for the inflow of illegal small arms and light weapons in Northern Kenya (Leff 2009; Mkutu 2007; Osamba 2000) and the subsequent violence among herders that results from illegal flow of arms and ammunition through Kenya’s porous borders. Limited state security has also been linked to the rise of non-state actors who trade in illegal firearms (Mkutu 2008, 2007). The proximity to war-torn countries in Eastern Africa contributes to trade in illegal arms in Northern Kenya (Wairagu and Ndung’u 2003). Illegal gun markets have been documented in Isiolo and Northern parts of Uganda (Human Rights Watch 2002; Mkutu 2007), with the Isiolo route being linked with the inflow of M-16 rifles among the Samburu of Baragoi. The inability of the Kenyan state to provide adequate security for its pastoralist citizens in the North has therefore created a huge demand for illegal arms to meet the demand for personal and communal security. Non-state actors, such as elites from this and other regions who have an interest either in the sale of arms, the trade in raided livestock or political offices, are therefore part of a network of ‘violent entrepreneurs’ who profit from violent cattle raids thus using culture to promote violence among pastoralists for personal gain (Abbink 2009). Straight (2009, p. 23) linked violence among pastoralists in northern Kenya with decades of marginalization of communities in this area. Straight further argued that the chronic violence that affects the marginalized pastoralists of Northern Kenya stems from the classification of pastoralists’ violence as ‘cultural’ and ‘normal’, not worthy of national attention of the political leadership in Kenya (2009, p. 24). Linkages between marginalization and insecurity among pastoralists in Eastern Africa have also been pursued by Mkutu (2007) who noted that incidences of violence that stemmed from illegally acquired weapons occurred in these areas due to the limited presence of state security personnel. According to Mkutu, “pastoral areas have historically been the victims of marginalization (political, economic and social isolation), with the absence of effective governance or, in some places, with the total absence of government and judicial systems” (2007, p.  62). Locals therefore have been forced to fend for

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

359

themselves in terms of provision of these services, including security. According to Scheper-Hughes, “structural violence ‘naturalises’ or normalizes poverty, hunger, sickness or premature death erasing their social and political origins so that they are taken for granted and no one is held accountable except the poor themselves” (Scheper-Hughes 2006, p. 13). The KPRs are at the base of structural violence in Northern Kenya, as it is an embodiment of the historic and systemic alienation of citizens from their rights for protection by the state security apparatus. The institution of KPRs can be seen as an avenue for informalization of violence as it offers pastoralist groups a form of ‘indirect rule’ or alternative authority, making them responsible for their own security while at the same time saving the state revenue that would otherwise be required to police these vast arid lands (Mkutu 2015, p. 202; Straight 2009, p. 26). In the next section, our analysis focuses on the linkages between ungoverned spaces and the informalization of violence through KPRs in pastoralist lands.

7   KPRs as Heroes on the Vanguard of Security Issues in Baragoi Available data indicates that due to the limited presence of state security personnel in this region, KPRs play the only effective policing role. This they do by gathering intelligence on impending attacks, tracking and recovery of raided animals, providing security to cattle kraals, providing security to herders and livestock in grazing lands, night patrols in the manyattas, engaging raiders on shoot-outs, monitoring the movement of raiders, and reporting conflict incidences that occur within their localities to the police. A case in point is captured below: It was reported by a Kenya Police Reservist within Nachola Location in Baragoi that today at about 0300 hours 800 armed cattle rustlers believed to be of Samburu origin raided Lomirok manyatta situated in Nachola area of Baragoi Division and made away with 205 camels belonging to Kelea Lokadongoi. During the incident, the Turkana morans shot dead 12 Samburu raiders. In the heavy exchange of fire, the following Turkana were injured: a Turkana female adult aged 47 years was shot on the right pelvis, a Turkana female adult aged 46 years was shot on the scapula while a Turkana male adult aged 43 years was shot on the chest. During the attack KPRs responded and expended 600 assorted types of ammunition. (Baragoi Police Station 2012a)

360 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

Given their knowledge of the terrain, KPRs are similarly critical in the recovery efforts of stolen animals. This they do through tracking livestock footmarks and leading police officers (mostly unfamiliar with the terrain) in grazing lands and bushes where morans hide raided livestock. For instance, on April 28, 2008, there was a shoot-out at a grazing field near Baragoi Secondary School. Armed Turkana raiders allegedly attacked Samburu herders and made away with 70 heads of cattle. The Samburu KPRs from Bendera village responded to the sounds of gunfire and caught up with the raiders at Naagis grazing reserve where a further exchange of fire led to the recovery of all the raided livestock by the Samburu KPRs (Baragoi Police Station 2008c). KPRs also play a critical peacebuilding role among the Samburu and Turkana. In some cases, KPRs pass information on raided livestock brought to their manyattas. In such cases, KPRs ensure that such raided livestock are handed back to the owners through the involvement of the police. These actions of returning raided livestock reduce tension between morans from rival communities and avert possibilities of revenge raids. This also indicates that some KPRs work beyond the ethnic divide of the Samburu and Turkana by sharing critical information among themselves and with police officers to aid recovery of stolen livestock, as illustrated below: To the post are two KPRs from Lonyangaten sub-location, they bring one cow belonging to a Samburu of Bendera village. The cow is one of the 16 heads of cattle stolen at Ngorishe hills grazing field on 24.4.2008. The cow was left behind by rushing raiders who raided Bendera village. It is now handed over to the owner. (Baragoi Police Station 2008d)

In their role of gathering intelligence on the movement of raiders, KPRs work very closely with chiefs from their own administrative areas. Given that raiders often group in pasturelands or in nearby thickets before launching raids, KPRs play a significant role in passing information on the sighting of raiders and thus preventing loss of lives and livestock. The Occurrence Book of Baragoi Police Station recorded various instances of this role by KPRs: Now to the post is the senior Chief of Elbarta who reports that he had communicated with his KPRs from Loruko who informed him that a group of

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

361

Turkana cattle rustlers attempted to raid the cattle grazing at Loruko but the KPRs were ready and overpowered them. (Baragoi Police 2008a) One Samburu KPR from Tuum made a report that today the 28th of December 2013; four suspected Turkana raiders were spotted by the advance party of KPRs heading to Simale village. An exchange of fire ensued between the suspected raiders and the KPRs forcing the suspects to run away. (Baragoi Police Station 2013a, b)

KPRs are vital for the protection of pastoralists’ villages, and many times they are the first causalities during raids. In our focus group discussion with KPRs from both Samburu and Turkana communities,9 every KPR had a bullet scar. In Bendera village alone,10 seven KPRs were killed during the Baragoi massacre in November 2012. On February 12, 2011, Pokot raiders killed a Samburu KPR at Suiyan. On April 23, 2011, Turkana raiders attacked Samburu herders at Lbaaoibor grazing field and killed a Samburu KPR. On June 8, 2011, Pokot raiders attacked Samburu herders in Ndonyo Nkere and killed a Samburu KPR. And on October 18, 2013, Turkana raiders attacked Samburu herders in Waso Rongai, killed two KPRs, and made away with their G3 rifles (Baragoi Police Station 2013a, b). Further cases of KPRs being killed during raids in Northern Kenya in recent times have been reported in Turkana and Baringo Counties (Kipsang 2015; Leting 2015). Lastly, in our interviews we were informed of cases where Turkana and Samburu herders locally trade in arms and ammunition which are later used in raids and other forms of violent actions. Cases of trade in weapons and ammunition were reported and recorded by the police as captured below: To the post is the Assistant chief of Bendera sub-location accompanied by a KPR who make a report that they received information that one Lperis Lombeu bought an AK47 rifle from a Turkana man at Leilei. They went to his manyatta and after interrogating him he showed them the rifle but refused to surrender it. (Baragoi Police Station 2009c)

KPRs, with their local knowledge of the illegal weapons trade, can thus be vital in stemming the proliferation of small arms and light weapons as 9

 Focus Group Discussion with Samburu and Turkana KPRs in 2014.  Focus Group Discussions with Bendera KPRs in September 2014.

10

362 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

they are familiar with the terrain and their operations in grazing lands and watering places locate them at the venues of illegal arms sale.

8   KPRs and Violent Raids in Northern Kenya KPRs have been accused of using their government-issued firearms and ammunition to join raiding parties, engaging in ammunition trade, loaning their firearms to raiders, taking part in highway banditry, and using their guns to seek employment as private security guards (Mkutu 2015; Mkutu and Wandera 2013; Weiss 2004). Cases of KPRs being killed during raids have raised the questions of ill-discipline among the KPR ranks, lack of loyalty to the state (but rather to the ethnic group or moran age group), and the use of government-issued firearms to commit crime for personal gain. For instance, on October 21, 2011, a Rendille KPR was among the injured raiders arrested by police in a failed raiding attempt at Kawap village of Samburu North Sub-County. The said KPR participated in the Kawap raid while armed with a state-issued MKIV rifle loaded with 17 rounds of ammunition (Baragoi Police Station 2011). This shows the institutional weakness that exists in the management of KPRs as they are not monitored on how and where they use their firearms and ammunition, thus many join raiding parties for self-gain. The participation of KPRs in local raids reinforces the argument of the duality of their power. At the individual level, owning a state-issued gun and ammunition gives the KPRs legitimacy in the use of instruments of violence. On the other hand, raids are communal events and participation in raiding parties by KPRs indicates the use of collective instruments of violence as a legitimate force against ‘enemies’. Our argument here is that the ungoverned space that is Samburu North enables KPRs to play a significant role in the ‘violent entrepreneurship’ value chain (Abbink 2009) that prevails between security personnel, chiefs, KPRs, and morans from the Samburu, Pokot, Rendille Turkana, and other communities in Northern Kenya. In one focus group discussion with KPRs,11 we were informed that the .303 calibre ammunition that is used in MKIV and MKI rifles is often purchased from corrupt police officers for 300 Kenya Shillings (c. US $3) per bullet. Another source of ammunition for the popular AK47 rifles is political leaders and gun runners who obtain their supplies in Isiolo and Lodwar towns. Baragoi town is ethnically  Focus Group Discussion at Bendera village in September 2014.

11

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

363

segregated. The Samburu reside on the upper side, they own shops and land on that side of the town. In the middle of Baragoi town there is the Maralal-Marti-Baragoi-South Horr road that separates the two communities. Leilei town on the Turkana side of Baragoi town is a busy centre with shops and business mostly owned by Turkana women. Leilei is also a hub for illegal firearms and ammunitions sales. It is notable that Samburu and Turkana do trade in arms and ammunition with each other. Their transactions contribute to the violence between the two groups in grazing lands and within cattle kraals. Incidences of cattle raids in Samburu North have been alleged to promote the selling of police ammunition through chiefs and KPRs. In police records from Samburu North, instances of huge amounts of ammunition issued to chiefs have been recorded (Baragoi Police Station 2009a). On the June 24, 2009, 100 rounds of 7.62 mm were handed over to the Chief of Uaso Rongai to be supplied to KPRs in his location. Similarly, on June 25, 2009, another 100 rounds of 7.62  mm special ammunition were handed over to the Chief of South Horr to be distributed to KPRs within his location (Baragoi Police Station 2009b). Further cases of handing over large numbers of ammunition to chiefs occurred on July 1, 2009. It is worthy of note that above-mentioned cases of arming of KPRs through chiefs do not correspond with any dates when raids occurred. A curious case of massive distribution of ammunition to KPRs occurred on December 26, 2012 when a Senior Sergeant of the Kenya Police was recorded in the Occurrence Book to have taken 2400 rounds of ammunition of 7.62 mm and 960 of 7.65 mm special ammunition to KPRs based in Masikita village (Baragoi Police Station 2012a). This is in contradiction to government policy which requires the issuing of ammunition to KPRs to be done through the Officer Commanding Station (OCS) in liaison with the Officer Commanding Police District (OCPD). Evidence from police reports indicates the complicity of KPRs in raids. In many of these cases, killed raiders turned out to be KPRs who joined raiding parties using state firearms. In the Baragoi massacre that occurred on November 10, 2012 (National Police Service 2013b), official police reports indicated that seven Samburu KPRs who took part in the botched operation were killed. There are cases where police investigations have revealed the use of KPR-issued guns in cattle raids among the Samburu and Turkana. Cases of misuse of arms are further captured in police records as indicated below:

364 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

The Officer Commanding Police Post (OCPP) now detains the rifle of one KPR from Marti location. Rifle MKIV with 10 rounds of ammunition. It is detained pending ongoing investigations against the KPR. (Baragoi Police Station 2008c)

Other incidences where KPRs have been found to have misused their government-issued firearms by engaging in raiding can also be found in police records (Kenya Human Rights Commission 2010). On April 12, 2010, a Samburu KPR was arrested and his MKIV rifle with five rounds of ammunition detained after he was found to have taken part in a raid against a Turkana community (Baragoi Police Station 2010). Similar incidences of KPRs using their arms to engage in cattle raids were captured in police records: To the Post are two Turkana KPRs who hand over a MKIV rifle serial number 360574 loaded with 3 rounds of ammunition which belongs to one Echomo Lokolonyei, a KPR who is under arrest at the post for the offence of stealing stock. (Baragoi Police Post Occurrence Book, October 6, 2008b)

There have been cases where KPRs have colluded with morans from their ethnic groups to plan and execute raids against their enemy communities (Kenya Human Rights Commission 2010). While some chiefs covertly support these raids, at times chiefs who disagree with these raiding plans are threatened by the same KPRs. Given the lack of an institutionalized code of conduct and proper training, KPRs can therefore be a security threat not only to their ‘traditional’ enemies but also internally to those who challenge their raiding plans. A case in point was the report by the then Senior Chief (now retired) of Elbarta who was threatened by his own KPRs for naming raiders from the Samburu community. His report is captured in police records as follows: The Senior Chief of Elbarta reports that yesterday the 18th of January 2013 at about 1900 hrs he had a baraza12 with members of the public from Bendera sub-location. This was over the issue of stolen goats and sheep belonging to the Turkana community by Samburu morans. The goats/sheep had been raided by Samburu morans on the 16th January 2013 and brought to Bendera. At the meeting he asked the community to return the stolen 12  Kiswahili for ‘public meeting’. Often presided over by local chiefs and administrative officers.

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

365

animals or else return the guns issued to KPRs. This is when some members turned against him when he mentioned the following suspects: Elmetaba Lelekalabu, Antony Leakono and Kamshina Lelet. They then threatened to kill the chief and started firing in the air. The named suspects were however not at the meeting as they were said to have driven the animals towards Ndoto in Loikumkum sub-location. Other members shielded the chief and escorted him to his home. But those who threatened to shoot him told him that they will never return the stolen animals. They included: a Samburu KPR (a guard at Kenya Power Station, Baragoi), L. Leakono who holds an illegal AK47 and Kamuri Letilipa, a KPR. (Baragoi Police Station 2013a)

The illustration above shows the power that KPRs derive from ownership of arms as it emboldens them to challenge state authority. Chiefs are key in the appointment of KPRs (Mkutu and Wandera 2013; Mkutu 2007) but as can be seen above, ownership of guns bestows upon KPRs local conceptions of power that enables them to challenge the very source of their own power; the chiefs who are the representatives of state authority within the locations. Cases of KPRs participating in pastoralists’ violence are common, owing to the lack of supervision, training, and remuneration. The lack of government support to the KPRs therefore encourages them to maximize on their power as owners of state-issued arms and ammunition for personal benefit. The motivation to be a KPR on the part of the reservist therefore lies in easy access to a gun and ammunition for one’s self-defence but also ultimately to contribute to communal fire power during inter-communal raids where the participants gain in terms of stolen livestock. It points back to Mkutu’s (2007) assertion that KPRs as an institution are indeed ‘security on the cheap’.

9   KPRs, Arms, and the Politics of Violence in Samburu North Since the upsurge of violent raids in 1996, acquiring arms has been vital to the survival of pastoralists’ households among the Samburu and Turkana. While illegal arms have found their way into Samburu North through gun traders and politicians, the battle for dominance has also been reflected in the manner in which different communities lobby and influence the local police to attain more KPRs. Having more KPRs means having more ‘legal’ firepower directed against the ethnically predefined enemy. In Samburu North, the Samburu administrative areas tend to have more KPRs than

366 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

Turkana areas. The issue of imbalance in the arming of KPR is seen by the Turkana as a deliberate measure aimed at entrenching the ability of the Samburu to militarily prevail in conflict situations against their Turkana neighbours. The disparity of guns allocated to KPRs among the Samburu and Turkana was noted by Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (2008) as one of the key complaints in their fact-finding mission on Samburu and Turkana violence in Baragoi. In their assessment, they noted that three quarters of KPR guns were allocated to Samburu KPRs, while Turkana KPRs constituted 25 per cent of KPRs in Baragoi.13 The politics of arming of KPRs is another facet of the role of violence in power politics between the Samburu and Turkana of Baragoi. In a recent petition to the President of Kenya, the Samburu North MP (a Samburu) asked for the replacement of Samburu KPR guns from MKIV to more semi-automatic versions such as AK47 and G3. In his request, the MP specifically mentioned the administrative areas (Samburu areas) in which KPRs guns needed to be replaced and left out Turkana administrative areas of Baragoi. This further reinforces our argument that, to local Samburu and Turkana and their leaders, KPRs and their arms represent symbols as well as very functional instruments of communal firepower against common ‘enemy’ communities. Reinforcing communal firepower therefore provides the needed edge (i.e., power) against one’s enemies in contests over land, votes, and pastures in the absence of the state. To politicians, the ability to provide better firepower to morans and KPRs entrenches the patron-client relationship that enables their preservation of political power through re-­ elections (Lentoimaga n.d.). There have been incidences where KPRs have been disarmed owing to what police describe as illegal use of state firearms. In other cases, political meddling by rival groups have led to pressure forcing the police to disarm KPRs in certain administrative areas while leaving other areas fully armed with their rifles (Baragoi Police Station 2012d). This precipitates the imbalance of power and encourages raiders to attack areas perceived to be vulnerable. Following the Baragoi massacre, there was political pressure for the disarming of Turkana KPRs who were accused of loaning their guns to aid Turkana warriors who killed police officers, Samburu warriors, 13  Similarly, in a memorandum to the Minister of Internal Security during a leaders’ meeting in Baragoi in 2009, the Turkana informed the minister of the imbalance in the distribution of walkie talkies to KPRs in Baragoi, with the Turkana KPRs receiving 20 per cent while the Samburu received 80 per cent (Ekiru 2009).

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

367

and Samburu KPRs in the botched Lomerok raid of November 10, 2012. The order to disarm the Turkana KPRs was however carried out in Parkati village, some 80 kilometres away from the scene of the Baragoi massacre. Parkati village is often attacked by Pokot raiders from Baringo County and Turkana clans from Lokori in Turkana South. The following KPRs from Parkati (including the chief) were disarmed (Baragoi Police Station 2012c): G3 with ammunition belonging to Assistant Chief Parkati, MKIV with 9 rounds of ammunition from the head of KPR in Parkati, MKIV with 5 rounds of ammunition from a KPR officer, G3 with 81 rounds from a KPR officer, MKIV with 8 rounds of ammunition, MKIV with two rounds of ammunition, MKIV with 3 rounds of ammunition, MKIV with 5 rounds of ammunition, MKIV with 2 rounds of ammunition, MKIV with 5 rounds of ammunition. Cases of temporary disarmaments of KPRs based on local political dynamics not only endanger whole communities who are exposed to more attacks but also drive the need to acquire illegal arms that further increases the levels of insecurity among the Samburu and the Turkana.

10   Privatization of KPRs in Samburu North High insecurity levels in Northern Kenya occasioned by limited presence of police personnel have increased the demand for KPRs as an alternative policing option. Some studies of KPRs and their welfare in Turkana County (Mkutu 2015; Mkutu and Wandera 2013) have established a trend where KPRs are increasingly being hired by NGOs, oil exploring companies, community banks, politicians, businessmen, and even churches as paid private security. This further reinforces our argument of pastoralist Northern Kenya as ungoverned space where the demand for personal and property security as a public good is in short supply. The privatization of KPRs raises the question of the sources of ammunition that are utilized by KPRs in these private engagements. In essence, it forces KPRs to acquire illegal ammunition to be ‘suitable’ for the job. It creates a ready market for ammunition trade and places KPRs as key actors in this trade. Further, the hiring of KPRs as private security guards deprives herders of the security back-up as they need to traverse pasturelands during the dry season. It exposes herders to attacks, especially when livestock have to trek long distances in search of pasture and water. Cases of KPRs abandoning their core responsibility of providing security to pursue other interests can be blamed on the volunteer and

368 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

non-­remunerational nature of the task. In focus group discussions, we were informed that KPRs do not earn any salary or allowances for the security services they provide. Cases of dropouts by KPR recruits have therefore become common as young men seek more productive opportunities. A case in point is captured in the following excerpt: Firearms from the following KPRs have been detained. N. N holder of firearm serial number 17325 with 3 rounds ammunition and E.  E holder of firearm serial number F2487 with 3 rounds of ammunition. The above KPRs are all from Parkati location. The chief of Parkati and the area councilor complained to the DC’s office that the said KPRs are no longer living in Parkati and there is need to recruit new KPRs to ease the security burden. In Parkati currently there are only 2 KPRs deployed at Parkati Primary School guarding the children against bandit attacks. (Baragoi Police Station 2008b)

KPRs are also increasingly being hired as bodyguards by politicians, thus shifting their loyalty and main responsibility from the protection of whole communities to that of the individual. Cases of privatization of KPRs have been found to expose their villages to the possibility of attacks from rival communities and to deny the villages a channel through which information on insecurity incidences can be relayed, especially those that take place in the grazing fields. Since the coming of county governments, Samburu County has created another layer of armed guards. These are pastoralist youth, employed as game rangers in the county since the establishment of County Governments in Kenya in 2013. While the ‘traditional’ KPR is a volunteer officer with no uniform and remuneration, these County Rangers are ‘upgraded’ KPRs with uniforms, semi-­automatic weapons, a patrol vehicle, and a salary (about KES 10,000 or US $100 per month). The creation of this new group of firearm holders (recruited from warrior age-sets) also adds another layer of actors, armed by the state but poorly supervised. Recruitment of rangers is also a matter of political contestation: in a meeting of Samburu elders that we attended at Baragoi laga, the reformed moran14 that was chosen to be employed as a ranger was rejected by the local MP in favour of another who was a known rustler. Recruitment of KPRs also comes with political undertones of 14  Reformed morans among the Samburu and Turkana of Baragoi are members of the Serian-Ekthil group. Serian is a Samburu word for peace, while ekthil also means peace in Ng’irutukana.

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

369

marginalization. The Turkana have complained of the skewed manner of recruitment of both the traditional KPRs and the County Rangers, arguing that Turkana areas have fewer KPRs who are often disarmed during periods of tension between the Turkana and Samburu of Baragoi to limit the military power of the Turkana and to make them vulnerable to Samburu attacks. Militarization of communities through KPRs, rangers, and chiefs within a system of limited supervision and checks largely contributes to the informalization of violence in Baragoi.

11   Chiefs as KPRs? Police records from Baragoi Police Station reveal that chiefs in all the locations and sub-locations are also allocated weapons and ammunition as KPRs. In our study area, we interviewed two Turkana chiefs who previously served as KPRs. In both cases, the KPRs-turned-chiefs informed us that they still retained the firearms issued to them in their capacities as KPRs. Further, they continued to receive even a higher allocation of ammunition from the police. The Police Act (Government of Kenya 2010) does not foresee this level of abuse when it comes to the appointment of KPRs. The double roles of chiefs as KPRs further contributes to the operational confusion and shows the ease with which one can become a KPR. A former KPR from Kawap location, for instance, became an Acting Chief when his chief was indicted over allegations of supporting Turkana raids against the Samburu. This acting chief15 of Kawap told us that he was able to obtain a G3 rifle in addition to his old MKIV rifle that he was allocated as a KPR. On the issue of ammunition, he informed us that he receives ammunition from the police, but many times he is forced to go to the illegal gun market in Leilei since the government supply is irregular and very insufficient. The unclear policy surrounding the appointment of KPRs aids the trade in ammunition in Samburu North and contributes in a significant way to the violent raids that Baragoi is synonymous with. In the police records, we noted that the Senior Chief of Baragoi location, in his capacity as a KPR, was given 80 rounds of ammunition in one instance. From the police records, there was no precedent of this kind of issuance (Baragoi Police Station 2012a).

 Interview March 2015, Lenkima village.

15

370 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

12   Conclusion This chapter sought to link the idea of informalization of violence with the rise of KPRs as a source of alternative authority in the ungoverned spaces such as pastoralists arid lands of Baragoi. We focused on the role of the Kenya Police Reserves, a volunteer unit that is deployed by the Kenyan state to provide policing and security services to pastoralists’ villages and grazing fields in Northern Kenya. Focusing on Samburu North district, we have argued that the KPRs are quasi-state actors in Baragoi, facilitated by the neglect and/or disinterest of the Kenyan state in the ungoverned spaces that exists in Northern Kenya (Idler and Forest 2015; Menkhaus 2007). The deployment of KPRs by the Kenyan state can be seen as a stopgap measure for the security challenges that bedevil the whole of Northern Kenya. However, given the volunteer nature of their job, KPRs owe their loyalties to their communities, and their guns are seen as communal assets. KPRs are therefore critical in defending their communities, but also very complicit in the violent entrepreneurship through the sale of ammunition, participation in cattle raids and highway banditry using state-issued arms and ammunition. From the perspective of the KPRs, the state-issued gun is in itself a source of power for self-defence of the individual, but also part of the communal pool of firepower that is needed for collective defence of communal interests such as livestock, land, and votes. The use of state-issued guns and ammunition in the above circumstance is considered legitimate and acceptable in the eyes of Samburu and Turkana KPRs. In Kenyan law, the use of arms for cattle raiding is considered robbery with violence, and therefore a challenge to the state’s power and monopoly in the legitimate use of force. The institution of KPRs therefore exemplifies the role of the state in the informalization of violence in Northern Kenya. While past studies have blamed pastoralists’ violence on the proliferation of illegal arms and ammunition through non-state actors, we argue that state actors, through KPRs, are a critical part of the value chain of actors that exploit the ungoverned space in Samburu North to benefit from violent entrepreneurship and establish a system of informalization of violence among the Samburu and Turkana. In this case study, incidences of massive transfer of ammunition during periods of peace indicate that the police in Samburu North collude with KPRs to sell ammunition. Similar cases were found in Turkana North in a study by Bevan (2008). The existence of KPRs as the only source of security for pastoralists in Northern Kenya demonstrates the distance between the state and

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

371

the citizens. This resonates with the description of O’Donnell (1993) of ‘low intensity citizenship’, alternatives to state authority and its links with the ‘shadow economy’ as experienced by citizens in ungoverned spaces.

References Abbink, Jan (2009). Conflict and Social Change on the South-West Ethiopian Frontier: An Analysis of Suri Society. In: Journal of Eastern African Studies, 3 (1), pp. 22–41. Aridi, Joshua (2013). National Police Reserve Study, Draft Report. Nairobi: UNDP. Baragoi Police Station (2013a). Threatening Report, Occurrence Book, January 19. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2013b). KPRs Shoot-out with Suspected Raiders. Occurrence Book, December 27. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2012a). Ammunition Handed Over to KPR. Occurrence Book, June 11. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2012c). G3 Rifle and Ammunition Handed Over to KPR. Occurrence Book, December 10. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2012d). Firearms from Parkati KPRs Withdrawn. Occurrence Book, November 25. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2011). Cattle Rustling and Shooting Incident at Kawap Village. Incident Report, Samburu North, October 21. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2010) KPR Rifle Kept. Occurrence Book, April 12. Nairobi. National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2009a). Ammunition Handed Over to Kenya Police Reservists (KPRs). Occurrence Book, July 1. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2009b). Ammunition Handed Over to South Horr Chief for KPRs. Occurrence Book, June 25. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2009c) Report of Illegal Gun in Bendera Sub-Location. Occurrence Book, May 16. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2008a) Cattle Rustling Report. Occurrence Book, September 7. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2008b) KPR Rifle Detained. Occurrence Book, October 6. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2008c) Recovered Cow from Lonyang’aten Handed Over. Occurrence Book, May 1. Nairobi: National Police Service. Baragoi Police Station (2008d) Shoot-out Incident in Lonjoorin. Occurrence Book, April 28. Nairobi: National Police Service. Bevan, James (2008). Blowback: Kenya’s Illicit Ammunition Problem in Turkana North District. Geneva: Small Arms Survey.

372 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

Buchanan-Smith, Margie / Lind, Jeremy (2005). Armed Violence and Poverty in Northern Kenya: A Case Study for the Armed Violence and Poverty Initiative. London: University of Bradford. Ekiru, Leonard (2009). Memorandum to the Honourable Minister for Internal Security. Presented by Turkana Community on January 23, 2009, during a Leaders Meeting at Baragoi. Government of Kenya (2013). National Police Reserve: Policy Framework, Draft Version 1 of July 2013. Nairobi: National Police Service. Government of Kenya (2010). The Police Act: The Laws of Kenya. Nairobi: Office of the Attorney General. Human Rights Watch (2002). Playing with Fire: Weapons Proliferation, Political Violence, and Human Rights in Kenya. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch. Idler, Anette and Forest, James (2015). Behavioral Patterns among (Violent) Non-State Actors: A Study of Complementary Governance. In: Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 4 (1), pp. 1–19. Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) (2010). Morans No More: The Changing Face of Cattle Rustling in Kenya. Nairobi: Kenya Human Rights Commission. Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (2019). Kenya Population and Housing Census. Nairobi: Ministry of Devolution. Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (2008). Report of the Fact-­ Finding Mission to Baragoi in Samburu North District on the Disarmament Operations of Warring Communities, Nairobi: Kenya Human Rights Commission. Kipsang, Wycliff (2015). We’ll Get Guns If You Don’t Stop Bandits, Baringo Governor Cheboi Warns State. Daily Nation, March 30. Kurimoto, Eisei / Simonse, Simon (1998). Conflict, Age and Power in North Eastern Kenya: Age Systems in Transition. Oxford: James Currey. Leff, Jonah (2009). Pastoralists at War: Violence and Security in the Kenyan-­ Sudan-­ Uganda Border Region. In: International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 3 (2), pp. 188–203. Lentoimaga, Alois (n.d.). Petition of the Member of Parliament, Samburu North Constituency to His Excellency the President of Kenya, State House, Nairobi, Kenya. Leting, Joan (2015). Two Kenya Police Reservists Killed, 2,000 Goats Stolen in Turkana. The Standard Newspaper, March 1. Masuda, Ken (2009). Resistance and Bravery: On Social Meanings of Guns in South-West Ethiopia. In: Schlee, Gunther / Watson, Elizabeth E. (Eds.), Changing Identifications and Alliances in North-East Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya. Volume 2. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 53–76. Matthysen, Ken / Finardi, Sergio / Johnson-Thomas, Brian / Danssaert, Peter (2010). The Karamoja Cluster of Eastern Africa: Arms Transfers and Their

  UNGOVERNED SPACES AND INFORMALIZATION OF VIOLENCE 

373

Repercussions on Communal Security Perceptions. Chicago, IL: International Peace Information Service. Menkhaus, Ken (2007). Terrorists Activities in Ungoverned Spaces: Evidence and Observations from the Horn of Africa. Presented at the Brenthurst Foundation’s ‘Southern Africa and International Terrorism’ workshop. January 25–27, Tswalu, South Africa. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/ Ken_Menkhaus/publication/237509428_Ter rorist_Activities_in_ Ungoverned_Spaces_Evidence_and_Obser vations_from_the_Horn_of_ Africa/links/53f4eee80cf2888a7491356e.pdf. Mkutu, Kennedy (2015). Changes and Challenges of the Kenya Police Reserve: The Case of Turkana County. In: African Studies Review, 58 (1), pp. 199–222. Mkutu, Kennedy / Wandera, Gilbert (2013). Policing the Periphery: Opportunities and Challenges of Kenya Police Reserves. Geneva: Small Arms Survey. Mkutu, Kennedy (2008). Guns and Governance in the Rift Valley: Pastoralist Conflict and Small Arms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mkutu, Kennedy (2007). Small Arms and Light Weapons Among Pastoral Groups in the Kenya Uganda Border Area. In: African Affairs, 106 (422), pp. 47–70. Mulugeta, Alemmaya / Hagmann, Tobias (2008). Governing Violence in the Pastoralist Space: Karrayu and State Notions of Cattle Raiding in the Ethiopian Awash Valley. In: Afrika Focus, 21 (2), pp. 71–87. Mutsotso, Beneah, M (2018). The National Police Reserve: Policing Pastoralists North Western Kenya. In: European Journal of Social Science Studies, 3 (1), pp. 81–95. National Police Service (2013a). Breakdown of KPRs within Samburu North Sub-­ County. Kenya Nairobi: National Police Service (KNPS) Vigilance House. National Police Service (2013b). Report of the Investigation Committee on the Baragoi Massacre. Nairobi: Kenya National Police Service (KNPS) Vigilance House. Oba, Gufu (1992). Ecological Factors in Land Use Conflicts, Land Administration and Food Insecurity in Turkana, Kenya. London: Overseas Development Institute. O’Donnell, Guillermo (1993). On the State, Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at Some Postcommunist Countries. In: World Development, 21 (8), pp. 1355–1369. Osamba, Josiah (2000). The Sociology of Insecurity: Cattle Rustling and Banditry in Northern Kenya. In: Africa Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1 (2), pp. 11–37. Poissonnier, Nicole (2010). Favourite Enemies: The Case of the Konso. In: Gabbert, Echi C. / Thubauville, Sophia (Eds.), To Live with Others: Essays on Cultural Neighbourhood in Southern Ethiopia. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, pp, 236–251. Powel, Joe (2010). Karamoja: A Literature Review. Retrieved from http://www. saferworld.org.uk/Karamoja%20A%20literature-­%20review.pdf.

374 

W. OKUMU AND E. M. KIOKO

Rabasa, Angel / Boraz, Steven / Chalk, Peter / Cragin, Kim / Karasik, Theodore (2007). Ungoverned Territories: Understanding and Reducing Terrorism Risks. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Ritchie, Sebastian (2011). The RAF, Small Wars and Insurgencies: Later Colonial Operations, 1945–1975. Cranwell: Royal Air Force. Rhodes House, Oxford/Micr. Afri./515/Annual Report/1923-1924. Sagawa, Toru (2010). Automatic Rifles and Social Order Amongst the Daasanach of Conflict-Ridden East Africa. In: Nomadic Peoples, 14 (1), pp. 87–109. Sharamo, Roba (2014). The Politics of Pastoral Violence: A Case Study of Isiolo County, Northern Kenya. Brighton: Future Agricultures. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (2006). Dangerous and Endangered Youth. Social Structures and Determinants of Violence. In: Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 1036, pp. 13–46. Schilling, Janpeter / Opiyo, Francis / Scheffran, Jurgen (2012). Raiding Pastoral Livelihoods: Motives and Effects of Violent Conflict in North-Western Kenya. In: Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 2 (25), pp. 1–16. Straight, Bilinda (2009). Making Sense of Violence in the “Badlands” of Kenya. Anthropology and Humanism, 34 (1), pp. 21–30. Tornay, Serge (2009). Modernization in the Lower Omo Valley and the Adjacent Marches of Eastern Equatoria, Sudan: 1991–2000. In: Schlee, Günther / Watson, Elizabeth E. (Eds.), Changing Identifications and Alliances in North-­ East Africa Volume 1: Ethiopia and Kenya. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, pp. 77–88. Wairagu, Francis / Ndung’u, John (2003). The Problem of Small Arms and Initiatives for Combating Their Proliferation, Circulation and Trafficking. In: ITDG EA Peace Bulletin, 2. Weiss, Taya (2004). Guns in Borderlands: Reducing the Demand for Small Arms. Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies. Whelan, Theresa (2006). Africa’s Ungoverned Space. Briefing addressed at the Portuguese National Defense Institute, Lisbon, May 24. Retrieved from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/62685519.pdf.

Secrecy and Visibility: Challenging Verwoerdism in South Africa’s Twentieth Century Julia Koch

1   Verwoerdism and Media: Introduction In South Africa, state formation from VOC1 rule and different kinds of chieftaincy or kingdoms to British colonial rule and first Boer republics to different shades of post-coloniality had a decisive moment in 1961 when the Union of South Africa left the British Commonwealth of Nations to establish itself as a republic. The character of this republic was purportedly ‘Christian-National’, as the ruling Nationalist Party (in Afrikaans: Nasionale Party) claimed. The referendum that led towards republicanization saw a slim majority of the electorate (approximately 1.8 Million

1  VOC, the Vereenigte Oost-Indische Compagnie, was a Dutch colonial corporation of aligned merchants running a business empire between 1602 and 1799, see Ulrich (2016).

J. Koch (*) Institut für Ethnologie und Ethnologische Sammlung, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_14

375

376 

J. KOCH

Whites2) agree to it, and contemporary observers diagnosed a socio-­ political ideological shift from Afrikaner nationalism to generalized White supremacy under Afrikaner tutelage (cf. Hepple 1967; Orlik 1968; Stultz 1969). Republicanization conditioned the implementation of the homeland policies, cutting Black African ‘nation-states’ out of South African territory. The scheme for afsonderlike ontwikkeling (i.e. ‘separate development’), on which the cutting off of the homelands and their administrative transformation was based, had already been pondered on by an influential secret society called the Afrikaner Broederbond since the early 1930s (Wilkins and Strydom 1980, p.  323).3 O’Meara describes the Afrikaner Broederbond accordingly as a “policy-making coordinating body” and “vanguard” of Afrikaner nationalism (O’Meara 1977, p. 166). With the personal union of Broederbond and National Party leadership roles and the latter’s ascent to state power in 1948, the promotion of afsonderlike ontwikkeling and a “new theologized nationalism” (Wilkins and Strydom 1980, p.  196) became state policy (Union of South Africa 1959). Yet, republic-making would not have been possible had not a substantial number of White South African English speakers voted for it in the referendum. Prior to it, Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd had posted a million printed facsimiles of a four-page handwritten letter of appeal to the electorate. In that letter he urged the “final settlement of the dispute” between the British monarchy and South Africa, and referred to the horror scenario of contemporary “chaos” in the Congo on the one hand and on the other 2  Writing about South African society implies as major fallacy an inherited and highly problematic group classification and terminology, which I am compelled to reproduce writing a partly historical account. I use capital letters to mark White and Black as categories. It is beyond the scope of the paper to develop alternatives to the terminology. 3  The Afrikaner Broederbond was founded in 1918 “as a sort of cultural society” (Wilkins and Strydom 1980, p. 46) on the model of the existing English clubs. After three years, the members decided to transform it into a secret society, and the number of ‘cells’, the smallest local organizational unit, expanded steadily from 1 (in 1920, with 37 invited members) to 23 (in 1930, with a total of 512 members) to a total of 12,000 members, organised in 810 cells, by 1977 (ibid. p. 47). Dan O’Meara (1977, p. 162) situates the Broederbond as an elite grouping, dominated by the Transvaal section of Afrikaner nationalism. Substantial membership fees and strict rules for personal and economic conduct distinguished the invited members from ordinary Afrikaners and specially from the ‘poor Whites’ identified in the Witwatersrand area. The National Party needed these workers as voters, however, and canvassed relentlessly to keep them away from ‘communism’. Until the 1970s, the composition of the Broederbond had changed from a majority of academics and teachers to a majority of businessmen (O’Meara, 1977, p. 164).

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

377

to the love people show for their children: “Sixty or more years of life lie ahead of many of them. I plead for their sake, their unity, safety and prosperity” (cf. Hepple 1967, p. 178). In this scenario, it is worthwhile to ask, with Pierre Bourdieu, with which symbolic capital the state produced and imposed categories of thought that a sufficient amount of White South Africans would “spontaneously apply to all things of the social world—including the state itself” (Bourdieu et al. 1994, p. 1). One kind of ‘capital’ the South African state claimed a monopoly over was the culturally framed knowledge about moralities and realities of Black life and White life in Africa. A political and Broederbond intellectual key player for both fields of belief, (bad) faith and action was the Dutch born Hendrik F. Verwoerd (1901–1966), whose career path traversed the fields of academia, journalism and politics to culminate in Broederbond, party and state leadership positions until he was—after surviving a first attempt on his life in 1960—killed in office in 1966. Opposition party member Alexander Hepple noted in the biography, which I take together with Marx’ recent publication ‘separation and angst’ (2020) as a point of departure for this chapter, “Verwoerd was dead but Verwoerdism would continue” (Hepple 1967, p. 207). Indeed, when John B. Vorster, the Minister of Justice from 1961 to 1966, took over government and party leadership until 1978, he “extended political apartheid to its extreme” (Giliomee 2003, p. 557) and stressed an unbroken chain of continuity. After he had been elected, he said in parliament, “My role is to walk further along the road set by Hendrik Verwoerd” (Kenney 1980, p.  266) and whereas publications on the person were rare for decades, the ideas Verwoerd epitomized impact South Africa until today (cf. Marx 2020, pp. 1–22). This chapter interrogates the challenges a changing media ecology posed to ‘Verwoerdism’, which Christoph Marx also calls the intellectual world (in German: Gedankenwelt) of Apartheid (Marx 2020). It sets off from the premise that the production and maintenance of authority irreducibly depend on communication media and on their use and possible augmentation by different actors in a society. The question is thus: which communicative contingencies inherent in television destabilized the governments’ self-representation as the sole source of authoritative knowledge defining society as a whole? The reasoning follows John Postill’s (2017) call to study actual social changes in a diachronic study of media. I use the events around Kevin Harris’ documentary Bara (1979) to show how the discourse of ‘balance’, forced on the SABC English

378 

J. KOCH

Documentary department, could be used in favour as well as in critique of state policies. In relation to the overall theme of the volume, this approach serves to look at the mediated nature of authority and elaborates the concept of ‘media-derived authority’ towards mediated authority to include media-related practices such as—in the case under consideration—Harris’ dismissal (Herbst 2003, p.  483). In the first part I define my tools of thinking and account for the methods I use during this research process. Then I trace the genesis of the South African republican state through the lens of the “spell” (Giliomee 2012, p. 84) Verwoerd held over the imaginations of the South African electorate in his period as politician and director of two northern Afrikaans press companies (Giliomee 2003, p. 535). The description of the “propaganda” (Marx 2020, pp.  166–194) of Verwoerdian authority precedes my analysis of events around the visualization of Black city life on the state broadcaster’s television programme.4

2   Approach In order to frame and thus meaningfully compare profiles of mediated authorization, I take off from Pierre Bourdieu’s reflections on the genesis of the state (Bourdieu et al. 1994) and Susan Herbst’s analytical scheme to scrutinize media-derived authority (2003). According to Bourdieu, to analyse the genesis of the state offers a chance to understand the symbolic power a state holds over different kinds of capital, which it accumulates to monopolies and whose conversion rates it fixes. In this perspective, the emergence of the state in human societies was not ex nihilo but resulted from a ‘process of concentration’ of different sorts of capital that led to the production of meta-capital or capital étatique (Bourdieu et  al. 1994, pp.  4–5). As this capital fixes the conversion rates between the others, what becomes the state takes the “vantage point of the Whole” (1994, p. 7). This happens not least through the state’s use of supposedly neutral fact-­finding commissions, and techniques such as census, statistics and accounting, cartography and archiving. These processes of normalization feed into the codification of a classification system in which the ‘legitimate’ national culture—and, one would add, the rules for the production 4  Surely, there had been other popular visibilizations before, most consistently since the 1950s in the popular ‘Black’ magazine DRUM (cf. Newbury and Sachs 2009). However, with the tightening of apartheid rules during Verwoerd’s reign, a gap in the representation of Black city life featured, particularly after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

379

of this culture—is formulated (cf. Bourdieu and Johnson 2011). Bourdieu’s “genetic structuralism” (1994; cf. Bourdieu and Johnson 2011, p. 4) is useful to consider fields of power, cultural production and the relationship between the two fields of forces through the recurrent notions of opposition and position. It does not, however, sufficiently explain the processual aspects of legitimacy or the exercise of power in practice as the habitus of the rulers and that of the ruled are set in structural isomorph with the state itself (Bourdieu et  al. 1994, p.  13). At the core of this problem lies, I argue, Bourdieu’s undecidedness if the “concentration of a symbolic capital as recognized authority” is “the condition or […] the correlate of all the other forms of concentration” (1994, p. 8, my italics). As Herbst shows in her review of theories of authority, the forms of epistemic, natural, de facto, de jure and moral authority and the empirically found overlaps between them, do not exhaust the notion of authority as it is irreducibly linked up with communication media (2003, pp. 484–486). She recurs to the theoretical insight that mass media confer status—a fast process today in the internet-age but surely harder to pursue in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Herbst, there are four dimensions to analyse media-derived or mediated authority, namely the high volume of coverage; the tone of ‘deferential attention’; the implicit or explicit assumptions that X either represents or moves public opinion; and lastly the portrayal of X as having the capacity to provide logic and persuasive evidence (2003, p. 490). This four-dimensional scheme serves as the backdrop for the comparison of Verwoerd’s and Harris’ profiles of authorization, in which media are not a function but a condition of the process of (de)legitimating the government policy of apartheid. Focusing on the mediation of authority and knowledge, I render a second dimension underestimated in Bourdieu’s rethinking of the state visible. In his account, the accumulation and re-distribution of stately capital appears straightforward, thanks to a selective use of historical data—colonial situations and post-colonial state formation are left unattended. Georg Simmel’s (1906) account of secrecy productively complicates the matter of authority and mediation, as it allows for an analysis of non-­ homogeneous—segregated—societies.5 Simmel underlined secrecy’s potential as a generative mechanism for constituting self, society and culture. Operations of concealment and revelation, inclusion and exclusion are interrelated, and he holds that “the relationships of men are 5

 The etymology of secret and segregation points to the same Latin roots.

380 

J. KOCH

differentiated by the question of knowledge with reference to each other” (Simmel 1906, p. 453). Keeping things secret is to not make others talk or even think about it, and it can be achieved in several ways, in tune with dynamics of forgetting and remembering (Connerton 2008). Slightly paradoxical, secrets need to be known as such and “secrecy […] must itself be performed in a public fashion in order to be understood to exist” (Herzfeld 2009, p. 135). Following Jones’ (2014, p. 53) reasoning on the intimate relationship between secrecy and mediality, I therefore argue that secrets travel across different media in order to coexist simultaneously in various mediated states and that they condition the legitimation of authority. Apartheid was, as historians hold, not only a system of racialized and racializing capitalist exploitation but moreover an idea and ideal groups of people believed in—an ideology (Dubow 2014; Giliomee 2003; Marx 2020; O’Meara 1977). Here, in line with Bourdieu, I would argue that “to speak of ideologies” is to locate in the realm of representations “what in fact belongs to the order of belief, i.e. to the level of the most profound corporeal dispositions” (Bourdieu et al. 1994, p. 14, italics original). It is the joint belief in the legitimacy as well as in the efficacity of power that allows subjects as well as rulers to participate in a greater whole. In accordance with Williams, I understand legitimacy as an “ongoing process that involves critical valuations on the part of both ruler and ruled concerning the justification for the exercise of power” (Williams 2010, p. 20). In his work on South African chieftaincy, he distinguishes between performance legitimacy on the one hand, based on expectations or events of delivering political or economic goods such as services and resources, and moral legitimacy on the other—the dimension in which the definition and evaluation of what constitutes appropriate political action take place.6 In this dimension of moral legitimacy, political action is explained with—as well as measured against—norms that rulers and the ruled share, and moral legitimacy formulates an ideal how things should be. In anthropology, shared norms are long since discussed with regards to myths, interpreted by Malinowski as charter for social action or, following Lévi-Strauss, as detachable from social action and inherently analysable. However, between these two conceptual poles of myths in relation to social practice, myth is also an element of discourse and as such to be found in effective speech unfolding itself in personal relationships and 6  See also Stultz (1969, p. 3), citing Apter on ‘end values’ end ‘efficiency’ in the legitimacy of government.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

381

institutions (Dracklé 1996). In the case of South Africa, the “political mythology” (Thompson 1985, 1962) of Afrikaner supremacy legitimized exploitation and inequality for decades. Whereas this legitimizing mythology was proclaimed, staged and supported continuously in apartheid South Africa, the media and the bureaucracy kept the living conditions in the areas of the Black population in the countryside as well as in the towns secret. Officials made access to these a wearisome procedure and thus kept the exchange of knowledge—and the authority to voice it—largely a one-­ way street, on which Black people would know much about White areas but had no space to articulate it and Whites, on the other hand, had a very limited knowledge of townships or homelands but spoke about it authoritatively. As bureaucrats maintained the obstacles, the twisted myth of a feasible and beneficial afsonderlike ontwikkeling, I argue, did not change with the assassination of Hendrik F. Verwoerd, the symbolic defeat inclusive to that killing notwithstanding (Posel 2009).

3   Methods Ulf Hannerz usefully applied Otto von Bismarck’s expression of politics as the ‘art of the possible’ to field work (2010, p. 77). He thus acknowledged the fact of the always changing temporal, spatial and social conditions of the craft of ethnographic research. This conditionality and contextuality I take to be part of the process. In the case at hand, I collected material eclectically, with one month of participant observation in the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) headquarters in Johannesburg, in 2018, adding to an intellectual and practical engagement with life in two of South Africa’s former ‘homelands’ since 2009 (cf. Koch 2019, 2017). Within the SABC I had chosen the archives and the official visitor’s tours as entry points for their very accessibility and officiality (cf. Ortner 2010). Informal talks there served as a hinge between preceding and following studies of South African, particularly Afrikaner, history, archival research of newspaper clippings and audio files of radio broadcasts, an Afrikaans language course, contemporary literature, particularly auto/biographies and visual popular culture. I accessed a second kind of archive, more of a “performance record” (Zeitlyn 2012, p. 469), when visiting the producer of Bara, Kevin Harris, in January 2020. As his mother had collected newspaper clippings relating her son’s dismissal from the SABC in October 1979, his previous work as filmmaker as well

382 

J. KOCH

as his subsequent struggle and breakthrough, a close look at the media practices and events constituting the challenge to authority was possible. Both methods, participant observation and interviewing, create situations of mutual self-presentation with positions which emerge later again in other contexts (cf. Dracklé 1996). My attentive presence in the SABC building in Auckland Park and the more or less controlled interviews there and outside of the premises brought me a sense of the temporal and structural dimensions of the institution “as it happens” (cf. Schatzki 2006) as well as a sense for what Bourdieu called the “field of cultural production” (Bourdieu and Johnson  2011). It was in a conversation with another senior White English-speaking filmmaker that I came across the Bara narrative, which had taken on mythical proportions of a David-versus-Goliath kind. Secretiveness and silences concerning the Broederbond and the past loomed large, as topics as well as communicative strategies with current and former employees.7 While some Black employees lamented not having a secret society as powerful as the Bond, some White people stressed its power to ‘destroy people’ and careers. And whereas Black employees repeatedly voiced the ‘dirty secrets’ of the institution’s past such as the separateness and qualitative differences of facilities and entrances, others flatly denied such secrecy. My own status would vary with the information I forwarded about myself. Sometimes I played the ‘outsider card’ whereas, at other times, I thought it useful to reveal my state as married to a South African man.

4   The ‘Spell’ of Dr Hendrik F. Verwoerd Arguably, Hendrik Verwoerd’s career was not only a product of circumstances but also the ambitious project of an individual theoretically and practically well versed in persuasive communication. Born in the Netherlands in 1901 but schooled in the Cape, in Bulawayo (then Southern Rhodesia), and near Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, he started studying sociology, psychology and logic at Stellenbosch in 1918 (Hepple 1967, p. 20) and was granted a research stay in the newly found 7  Ellipsis, respectively aposiopesis, sometimes in combination with the rhetorical question “you know?”, were common. The pervasion of Broederbonders in the SABC higher echelons was so strong that the hearings an independent broadcasting commissions held to find new managers in the early 1990s had non-membership as a condition for working at the SABC.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

383

academic institutions of psychology in Germany and the USA between 1926 and 1927 (cf. Marx 1993). In the early 1930s, Verwoerd first occupied the Chair of Applied Psychology in Stellenbosch, later that of Sociology and Social Work. In the course of preparing and realizing for the churches a Volkskongres in 1934, he defined ‘White poverty’ as a key social problem for European settler colonies in Southern Africa, to which he and his Social Work graduates—and not the current state or the churches—would present relief through case work (Balstad Miller 1993, p. 658; cf. Seekings 2008). In an interview with the newspaper Die Burger in 1957, Verwoerd described the 1934 conference as his entry point into politics because his efforts to follow up the decisions of the conference “led me to one conclusion, the plight of my people cannot be remedied except by political machinery” (Hepple 1967, p.  35). On having convinced himself that the resolutions taken by the conference rested with the politicians, Verwoerd decided there was only one obvious course for him to take. In his own words, “You, yourself must be the government” (Hepple 1967, p. 35). Verwoerd accordingly started his political career in the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party (the ‘Purified Nationalist Party’, 1935–1948) under Daniel F. Malan,8 and when he became minister and prime minister, the competencies of the state enlarged tremendously. Verwoerd moved away from academia in 1937 when Malan, himself editor of the Capetonian Afrikaans newspaper Die Burger, made Verwoerd a newspaper editor in the Transvaal to further the Nationalist cause through the medium Die Transvaler there (Hepple 1967, p. 42). Verwoerd himself canvassed extensively for subscriptions, and once the publication business was set up, his editorials centred heavily on Afrikaner unity by agitating against Jews, Liberals and British politics, particularly during World War II, and against the Black majority population later on. As Marx’ analysis highlights, the concept of ‘newspaper’ does not exactly apply to Die Transvaler as it was purely a propaganda tool, which Verwoerd used without any consideration of journalistic values (cf. Marx 2020, p. 169). In the lead editorial of the first issue of Die Transvaler, Verwoerd announced that the paper would “Serve a people by making the voice of true and sublime nationalism resound wherever that voice can reach” (cited in Hepple 1967, p. 45). Consequently, when the British royal family visited South Africa in 1947, The Transvaler was the only newspaper to 8  This party had broken away from J.B.M. Hertzog’s National Party when it united with Smut’s South African Party.

384 

J. KOCH

refuse reporting on that mega event as its goal was the establishment of a republic (cf. Marx 2020, p.  173). In the same year, becoming the self-­ proclaimed voice of “true and sublime nationalism” through his editorship, Verwoerd became a member of the all-male secret society Broederbond and was soon elected into its Executive Council, in which he served until 1950 (Wilkins and Strydom 1980, p. 4). In his editorials, he marked the work of the Broederbond and its allies as non-political, as it was supposedly above heavily contested party politics of that time. The same rhetoric techniques he used as journalist he would use later as politician, namely the personalization of conflicts, endless repetition of the same line of argument, simplification, generalization and, most importantly, distortion in the sense that in his perspective victims became beneficiaries of his solutions (Marx 2020, pp. 175–180). Upon the reunited National Party’s election victory in 1948, the new Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan nominated Verwoerd as senator. When it became clear that the campaign slogan of ‘apartheid’ needed grounding and conceptual support (cf. Posel 1987),9 Malan made him Minster of Native Affairs in 1950. Verwoerd’s change of focus from White poverty to Native Affairs represents two sides of the one coin of Afrikaner ‘upliftment’ as the discrimination against non-Whites had to serve this basic purpose (cf. Hepple 1967, pp.  26–28). In 1958, upon Prime Minister Hans Strydom’s death, Verwoerd became party leader and prime minster in a fierce contest with other Broederbonders. Verwoerd had already created states within the state as Minister of Native Affairs: through the work of a ‘research division’ in his ministry, he administered the information necessary to devise his policy, namely stereotypes about ‘the Bantu’—and the amount of laws he steamrolled through parliament is impressive (Balstad Miller 1993, p. 657). In his practical effort to revive tribalism, he would stage state visits to the rural areas—complete with elaborate gift-­ exchanges, joint meals and long talks to chiefs and headmen—in which Verwoerd attempted “to imitate the old tribal idiom” with “childish allegories” that were “based on his conceit that he ‘knew’ the native” (Hepple 1967, p. 118; cf. Marx 2020, pp. 334–335). 9  Posel holds that, in the 1940s, “versions of apartheid differed over a basic question, the relationship between ‘political segregation’ and the ‘economic integration’ of Africans in ‘white’ areas” (Posel 1987, pp. 125–126). The main bone of contention lay in the eviction or maintenance of Africans within the economic structure, as they were perceived as either compatible or ultimately incompatible.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

385

He had pushed for the homeland policies and replaced a traditionally rather unsystematic regulation of Black peoples’ lives with an administration based on two principles: maintaining White supremacy and providing cheap Black labour. Key to both aims was the forceful imposition of afsonderlike ontwikkeling, a scenario of a united White South Africa separated from several rural Black ‘homelands’, with migrant workers in the urban areas as temporary sojourners. If he mentioned the negative consequences of this policy for the Black population, he called them a sacrifice necessary for the prospering of the nation as a whole (Giliomee 2012, p. 84). After the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, the subsequent entanglement of police action and protest and an attack on his life by a White farmer in April, he issued a letter alluding that the policy of separate development held an “underlying good […] for all in the future” (Hepple 1967, p. 155). Within this logic, resistance against his schemes of afsonderlike ontwikkeling became a threat to the fulfilment of the nation in a secular ideology of salvation. Whereas contemporary observers and critics often aimed at the feasibility of afsonderlike ontwikkeling, the rhetoric and politics of Verwoerd addressed its necessity for White ‘survival’ (Giliomee 2012, p. 82) and his constituency’s rightful claim to a White-owned South Africa, totally refusing dialogue on the premises of the policies (Marx 2020). Time and again he would start from the horror scenario of social integration leading to Afrikaner’s biological extinction and then argue backwards along his chain of reasoning as to why not the smallest concession should be given to Black people on White territory (Marx 2020, p. 186). He would speak in Parliament for hours on this scheme, detailing it to the last jot. According to these incantations, after phases of influx and saturation of Black workers to the cities, there would be a reversal at some time in the future as Black people would prefer to live in their ‘own’ homelands. The projection of demographic and financial development of South Africa and the independent republics-to-be, discussed in Parliament as well as in Broederbond circulars, was preposterously detailed and, in hindsight, totally inaccurate (Wilkins and Strydom 1980, p.  208). With regards to the correct and improper understanding of these principles, Hepple cites Afrikaner complaints that Verwoerd made them drunk with his endless polemics. Those he did not convince, he confused into passivity. A popular quip in Afrikaner circles was the recitation of the degrees of comparison of the Afrikaans word verward (confused), in

386 

J. KOCH

which the normal comparative verwarder was followed by a new, sarcastic superlative—Verwoerd (Hepple 1967, p. 99).

Contemporary observers noted how he continuously and indiscriminately lectured interlocutors, inside and outside parliament, and that the suggestive and “long drawn-out speeches” (Hepple 1967, p.  236) Verwoerd made in public mesmerized his Nationalist supporters. Marx (2020) maintains that Verwoerd continued the staging certainty from his years as a social scientist, in which (psycho)logics, statistics and the aura of science could effectively be used both to shape and to defend social policies. Rhetoric and logic, persuasion and search for ‘truth’ seemingly fell into one (Marx 2020, p. 186). Thus, the polemics, inaccuracies and distortions notwithstanding, rationality and apparently disinterested knowledge about the ‘other’ were at the heart of Verwoerd’s self-representation as legitimate and capable leader of the Afrikaner people. Irrespective of a large amount of tautologies and the unbridgeable gap between the spending on the homeland-building and the expectations he assigned to them, he was presented—and presented himself—as an ingenious prophet, predicting a Golden Age of the everlasting domination of Whites in South Africa.10 4.1  The God-Given Volksleier Upon Verwoerd’s assassination in September 1966, the National Party caucus passed a motion, recording “its appreciation to the Almighty for granting a Hendrik Verwoerd to South Africa for so long and for the rich heritage which he left us” (Hepple 1967, p.  206).11 It was just a few months after the largest ever general election victory of the NP in March (winning 126 out of 166 seats in Parliament), and the creation of the 10  As Giliomee (2012, p. 57) outlines, the complementary projection into the past contained the claim that South Africa was hardly settled until the seventeenth century and that ‘the Bantus’ and ‘the Dutch’ arrived at the same time, albeit from different directions. This claim was refuted in 1969 by detailed historical work in Wilson’s and Thompson’s Oxford History of South Africa. 11  Alexander Hepple was the leader of the South African Labour Party and Member of Parliament contemporary to Hendrik Verwoerd. His concise biographic account dwells on newspaper reports and Hansard debates and, in contrast to later assessments—for example by Giliomee (2012)—, does not subdue contemporarily widespread religious rhetoric in favour of highlighting Verwoerd’s rationality.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

387

legend of Verwoerd’s invincibility, his “apotheosis” had been well established (Kenney 1980, p.  261; Posel 2009, p.  335). However, upon the election as party leader and prime minister in 1958, Verwoerd had already assumed that “the will of God was revealed in the ballot” (Hepple 1967, p. 133) while fellow party member Johannes de Klerk declared in Pretoria that Verwoerd’s election was “not a mere accident but part of God’s plan for this nation on the southern corner of Africa” (cited in Hepple 1967, p. 143). One event that probably sparked these beliefs both publicly and personally was Verwoerd’s survival of an assassination attempt. On 9 April 1960, the English farmer David Beresford Pratt attacked Verwoerd during the opening of a trade exposition when he fired two bullets into his head from close distance (cf. Wolf 2012). The effect on Verwoerd had been a “heightened confidence in his God-given mission” (Hepple 1967, p. 154). As Verwoerd himself put it while recuperating in hospital, “I heard the shots and then I realised that I could still think, and I knew I had been spared to complete my life’s work” (quoted in Posel 2009, p. 348). When the republic and, in Nationalist parlance, the ‘spiritual independence’ of South Africa had finally been established and economics waxed, the volksleier was able to boast that this success and the good time since republicanization “have adequately proven that this was an act of providence” (cit. Hepple 1967, p. 184).12 12  Stressing his own special relationship with God, Verwoerd was however careful not to directly employ the bible to legitimate his power or politics. Claims on biblical ‘legitimation’ of apartheid policies had been shown to be invalid in the past. Presented by Dutch Reformed Church theologian A. G. J. Oosthuizen at a World Council of Churches meeting in 1954, the claims had been thoroughly refuted by the international theological community and could not be validated in the following years, commitments of special commissions notwithstanding (Wilkins and Strydom 1980, p. 205). Yet, two discursive strategies were employed by Nationalist Afrikaners members, who claimed to know the truth better than what theological experts advised. For one, they would use biblical texts arbitrarily and out of context, offering a particularly biased interpretation of the Genesis’ narratives about Noah’s sons and the Tower of Babel (Thompson 1962, p. 134; cf. Crapanzano 1986, p. xi). They would also rely on an identification of the history of Israel with that of the Afrikaners/Boers, Godchosen to Christianize South Africa (Wilkins and Strydom 1980, p. 290; cf. Bosch 1986; Du Toit 1985). Du Toit summarizes: “Because of their belief that they were a Chosen People, the Afrikaners came to believe that God had taken a direct hand in shaping the organization and behavior of Afrikaner society […]. The assumption thus was that Afrikaner society was ‘sanctified’, and traditional behavior, attitudes, values, and institutions were reified and made moral imperatives. Virtually any modification of the traditional life-style assumed the status of a sacred rather than purely social violation” (Du Toit 1985, p. 75).

388 

J. KOCH

5   State Television: Balance, Doubt and Outrage Since its foundation in 1936, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was a parastatal, a state-owned monopoly enterprise (Horwitz 2001, p. 56; cf. Rosenthal 1974). Its possible roles as a potent political tool as well as a symbol for White South Africans had become clear with the successes of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and its European and American counterparts. In contrast to newspapers’ limited circulation and popularity, radio—and later television—would allow for a much more vivid imagination of the community envisaged. Thus, in the 1930s the South African government decided that the radio technology could no longer be left to private or amateur interests, but appropriated and monopolized it. As Hayman and Tomaselli hold, there is an element of power and control over ideology in broadcasting […]. This power operates at various levels, from the overt and changing level of programmes, to the less publicly accessible and more structural level of the institution’s internal apparatus (Hayman and Tomaselli 1989a, p. 4).

On the structural level, a major shift in the ‘apparatus’ in South Africa can be dated to 1960, the year of the referendum on the republican question. While on the one hand direct government control over the SABC waned in 1960, the long-lasting co-optation of the SABC into Broederbond principles, which in turn stood close to the governing Nationalist Party, was near-complete by then. In that year, an amendment of the 1952 Radio Act allowed for the raise of license fees as well as the creation of ‘equal but separate’ administrative structures for Black programs, in which White supervisors with government training in the various South African languages were installed to prevent “disparaging remarks about government policy” on air (Hayman and Tomaselli 1989b, p.  60). Additionally, the government granted the SABC a loan for the installation of an expensive high-quality far-distance transmission system, a technological condition for tighter national-medial integration. All this happened the year after Broederbond chairman and professional public relations officer Piet Meyer superseded the bi-lingual musician and actor Gideon Roos as General Director of the SABC—to remain in this influential position for 21 years until 1980.13 13  Meyer became Chancellor of the Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit (RAU) from 1978 to 1983. These three institutions—the Broederbond head office, the SABC and the RAU—are situated just a stone’s throw from each other in Johannesburg.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

389

Within that field of power—and with Verwoerd’s close associate Albert Hertzog as Minister of Posts and Telegraphs from 1958 to 1968—the introduction of television was spectacularly delayed in South Africa far into the 1970s. Television’s rendering of the facticity of power relations was taken seriously by both opponents and proponents who recognized that, once established, it could be a propaganda tool for the government and a window to the world—or into South Africa itself, a mirror (Harrison and Ekman 1976; Orgeret 2015, 2009). One argument for the delay was that the press was already ‘dominated’ by English-medium publications and that the SABC had to provide a balance.14 In order to make visible the power imbalances within the language of balance, journalists and whistle-blowers would rely on two conditions. The first would be the availability of written or visible evidence, removed from the volatility of the spoken word or quick gesture itself.15 The second condition for successful publicizing of secret knowledge would be the spotless qualification of the messenger who had to be credited as trustworthy—while often remaining invisible.16 One way to achieve that would be the recurrence to a different form of moral legitimacy the messenger adheres to. In the case I present, it was not a Christian God Harris evoked to justify worldly disobedience—but rather a blossoming professionalism

14  In the first two years commercials were not allowed, and people who spent money on TV sets and licenses were thus addressed not as consumers but as citizens (Harrison and Ekman 1976, p. 104). 15  Tomaselli et  al. (1989, p.  112) quote SABC foreign correspondent Cliff Saunders describing the policy of alignment to government policies as one that worked qua “osmosis”, not leaving traces, and the documentary filmmakers said they had asked for written guidelines, which were never provided. Instead, on the level of work organization and positions, a middleman was inserted into the hierarchy at the SABC. People with the occupational title “organiser […] translated consensual discourse from the upper management into organisational practice” (Tomaselli and Tomaselli 1989, p. 116). 16  Sunday Times journalists Wilkins and Strydom publicized Broederbond material such as circulars and membership lists in 1978, first in the newspaper as a six-part series, then, much more elaborated, as a book. They relied on the leakage of documents by a “disillusioned” member, “deeply shocked” by the Soweto “riots” in 1976 which made him aware for the “first time” of the “depth of Black dissatisfaction with the status quo” (Wilkins and Strydom, 1980, preface). The same anonymous apostate would say he was deeply disturbed when the Minister of Justice, Jimmy Krueger, was quoted to be left koud (Eng. ‘cold’) by the 1977 death (read murder) of Steve Biko in police custody. Now, he would be “in the twist as this is against his Christianity but the Broederbond oath is also sworn before God” (Wilkins and Strydom 1980, preface).

390 

J. KOCH

as filmmaker. The tools he used against Verwoerdism were statistics and authorized statements by medical doctors and other health-care professionals, hence the same set of discursive devices as had worked to build up confidence in Dr Verwoerd’s monologue prophesies. 5.1  The Story of Bara and Its Aftermath Kevin Harris, a junior documentary filmmaker with British heritage and a family record of civil service, had managed to get approval for a documentary, Bara (1979), to be shot around Christmas and New Year 1978–1979, to be produced and broadcasted by the SABC on 11 October 1979 in a slot after prime time. The credits which the film as well as his previous programmes received show that Harris had mastered the work of filmmaking in a way superior to much of the SABC programme broadcast so far. Additionally, letters show that his behaviour during shootings had been commendable. Bara’s theme was the Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, which still is one of the largest hospitals on the African continent.17 In the opening scenes, the hospital is situated within Soweto, which White South Africans might have known of through newspaper reporting for its ‘riots’ since June 1976; the scenery had not made a television appearance before, however (cf. Crapanzano 1986). The township, visualized in a few barracks, wakes up at dawn to the sound of a hymn-like song sung by the hospital’s staff choir, and the introduction further depicts a horse cart, home scenes with crying babies and people getting ready to go to work in Johannesburg, travelling in overcrowded trains. The bridge between these images of the moving trains and the hospital are aerial shots which zoom in and out of Soweto to settle on an emergency car driving to Baragwanath Hospital. The continuous voice-over commentary added to the song and the images relates to the diseases spread in the township, “in the shadow of Johannesburg’s consciousness”, and the high probability to become a victim of crime there, “at least one member of every fourth Sowetan family” (Harris 1979, 01:10 min). 17  YouTube link, Harris, Kevin (1979), Bara. SABC documentary, now www.youtube. com/watch?v=3C2I-dxECCg&t=2663s. Sadly, but ironically, part of the controversial opening scenes got lost due to a technical failure when Harris recorded and privately screened the broadcasting (Interview Harris, 29 January 2020). The scenes are partly maintained, however, in the 1996 film “SABC television 20 years—the untold story”, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DzyJgI-qA-s. See 26:41 min–27:54 min.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

391

The film is made in a realist documentary style and relies heavily on the spoken word. It combines interview voices, historical footage, matter of fact voice-over guidance saturated with statistics, and fly on the wall camera work in order to comprehensively and partly celebratory communicate the work of the hospital. Various aspects of the hospital and its situatedness within Soweto are presented. For example, social workers and nurses explain post-natal community work and the approach a traditional healer (sangoma) would have to a patient in contrast to a doctor at Bara. From visualizations featuring a traditional healer practicing her craft, the film returns to the hospital interior (10:21 min), and we hear a doctor explain that “from the mass screening of patients […] valuable research opportunities are afforded from the data obtained”. One hears the voice of another anonymous professional who states that the locally high rate of cervical cancer could be easily prevented. Recurrently, Bara juxtaposes visualizations from the townships with scenes from the inside, such as nurses’ training in a classroom or close-ups from eye and heart operations. The choir is a constant auditive companion, a third layer to the voices and the visuals, singing a mix of isiXhosa and English-language songs. Towards the end, the viewer is confronted with a stream of casualties dropping in at the entrance as “victims of violent crime” (Harris 1979, 43:00 min). However, the hospital’s staff is praised for its relentless commitment: “of the 352 casualties admitted at that particular night, only one was fatal”. The documentary ends after around 50 minutes with images from a Caesarean, and the “miracle of birth” is accompanied by the Xhosa song Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (‘Lord, Bless Afrika’) sung by the staff choir. Harris had researched the data for the voice-over commentary in libraries as well as in English newspapers, namely the Rand Daily Mail, Sunday Express and Sunday Times, as he related during our interview (on 29 January 2020). He compared his work on Bara, both the research and the experience in the township, to a “revelation”—although he had been exposed to some liberal thinking in his student days already. As Harris remembered, the documentary had gone pre-broadcasting for a courtesy screening to the hospital, and afterwards the hospital’s White chief superintendent Dr Beukes objected to the opening scenes as they would not show the “tarred roads” and “Mercedes Benzes” in Soweto. With this, Beukes evoked the language of ‘balanced’ reporting so deeply ingrained in the policies of the SABC. Disputedly, he would contact higher-level executives at the SABC, and Kevin Harris was ordered to cut the opening scenes. Harris agreed to do the cutting, but deliberately did not do it and

392 

J. KOCH

the documentary went on screen unaltered. The next day he was dismissed and made the whole story public. In retrospect, he said that the press was already “waiting” for something like this to happen, indicating a feedback loop of re-translating and amending data and story on their way between two mass media.18 Harris’ dismissal became a token for discussion in English and in Afrikaans newspapers when he turned to the editors of the Rand Daily Mail and other newspapers to publicize his story (Interview Peter Bayer, former sub-editor of RDM, 10 April 2020). More than a dozen newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, sometimes in combination with an acclamation for the film itself, sometimes with questions on the procedure of the dismissal or the alleged outside interference in SABC procedures. Afrikaans newspapers praised the documentary as “one of the most magnificent programs of that sort, local and imported, which we were given to see” and deemed it “balanced” and “the absolute pinnacle of visual pleasure”. Yet, besides the indulgence of seeing a programme making “the 37,00 Rand license fee worth paying in the last few months” (letter to the editor of Post, 19 October 1979), it was thought-provoking as well. One journalist in the Afrikaans-medium weekly Rapport wrote that Bara “het my as Afrikaner aangegryp”, that is, it ‘seized me as an Afrikaner’. While all the journalist-commentators lauded Bara, a Baragwanath cardiologist chided the filmmaker for not showing the overcrowding in the wards which led to the deaths of patients. “Let us, for a change, have some honesty in reporting”, he was said to have admonished (The Star, 16 October 1979). This narrative gained independence, and journalists started to link Harris’ dismissal to the disclosure of the hospital’s inadequacy (The Star, 8 February 1980; Sunday Tribune, 20 November 1983). For Harris, in contrast to the cardiologist, it had been reasonable to show the hospital in a positive light—not least because he had nostalgic feelings towards the hospital as subject matter.19 The different ways of interpreting 18  In a further turn of the loop, Harris’ own production company was commissioned to produce a SABC TV documentary by the name “SABC TV 20 YEARS—The Untold Story” in 1996. This told the story of censorship through a presentation of two departments, News and English Documentary—and the Bara-case was a key event. 19  He spent his childhood in a comparable setting, with his father being the financial administrator of a hospital in Natal. Remembering this context, he said, made him make the film in the first place. Scenes of nurses carrying candles through the patients’ wards on Christmas, singing hymns, reminded him of his childhood and he placed this in the very middle of the film.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

393

the documentary highlight the social construction of the language of ‘balance’ and the polysemy of the audio-visual form. Information can differ sharply from the intended meanings (cf. Hall 2006). Forty years later in our interview, Harris still insisted that it was purely the opening scenes Beukes had objected to, neither the repeated images of township life in the middle of the documentary nor the doctors’ assessments of the simplicity of preventing certain diseases. When it came to Harris’ dismissal from the state broadcaster, the newspapers varied in their reactions. While some called Harris ‘naughty’, others by contrast highlighted Harris’ morality and the alleged outside interference.20 The Afrikaans tabloid Beeld quoted him saying he acted as “verantwoordelike blanke Suid-Afrikaner” (i.e. ‘responsible White South African’) and wanted to contribute to a better understanding between the races in South Africa. Most commentators implicitly or explicitly doubted not the legality of the short-notice dismissal but the legitimacy of the reaction. In December 1979, Afrikaans newspaper Die Vaderland commented on the penalty as too hard and acerbically asked if the cutting of the introductory scenes would have convinced the public that living standards in Soweto and Linden—a rather posh Johannesburg suburb—were equal.21 The Citizen’s reporter Lynn Carlisle quoted Dr Beukes saying “You try to help out and then it just ends up with trouble”. This language of ‘help’ and ‘trouble’ obscures as well as highlights power relations, as the hospital’s superintendent belongs to a different organizational hierarchy. Thus, the comment underlines the nature of Harris’ challenge to authority that arose within in an overcrowded corporeal hierarchy, insecure of how to appropriate a new medium. 20  In October 1979, the English-medium, government-controlled newspaper The Citizen quoted from the letter Harris wrote to his SABC supervisor, stating: “Placed in a position of moral dilemma, where my personal integrity and the basic values of truth and honesty are at stake, I made a decision to disobey the instruction from management to remove the opening sequence—dealing with sociological conditions of Soweto—from the programme”. 21  The Rand Daily Mail and, following suit, the Sunday Express as well as the Cape Argus quoted Harris’ allegations that it was a case of “political manipulation” and that a “secret political censor” was the source of the summons to cut the opening scenes. What had been on page three of the Rand Daily Mail, journalist Marian Shinn made a page one cover story for the Sunday Express on 14 October 1979. After telling her readers that Dr Beukes, chief superintendent of the hospital, objected after the courtesy screening to “2 ½ minutes [….] and the commentary”, she quoted extensively from the voice-over of the introduction. Her report appears obscure in its effort to ‘balance’ the various voices which appear to talk past each other.

394 

J. KOCH

5.2  Bara Within the Field of Documentary Media Production Pierre Bourdieu has stressed the opposition between art and money, creativity and economics as the structuring opposition within the field of cultural production (Bourdieu and Johnson 2011). In contrast to the capitalist societies he had in mind, the scenario of state broadcasting monopoly re-frames the opposition as one of beliefs in individual thinking versus beliefs in inward-oriented nationalist culture. Nevertheless, the dynamics of the opposition remain: The dominant are drawn towards silence, discretion and secrecy, and their orthodox discourse, which is only ever wrung from them by the need to rectify the heresies of the newcomers, is never more than the explicit affirmation of self-evident principles which go without saying and would go better unsaid. […] the challengers […] break the silence of the doxa and call into question the unproblematic, taken-for-granted world of the dominant groups (Bourdieu and Johnson 2011, p. 83).

I suggest that, following Bourdieu’s analysis, the possibility for the newcomer Harris’ ‘heresy’ in the field of cultural production was conditioned on his very position. He said, “I was too low profile in the SABC for them to be suspected for what I was intended doing” (The Star on 16 October 1979). Phrased from the oppositional position, one of his superiors said to him 20 years later: “I just never knew you cared so much” (Interview, 29 January 2020). Harris, who had been extensively trained in-house after receiving his degree in engineering, had “hi-jacked” the programme, the same executive said (Harris 1996, min 30:02). Harris transgressed the position assigned to him—and for which he should have been grateful and obedient. In a newspaper interview in 1980, the Deputy General Director of the SABC made it clear that, by his actions, Harris “had totally destroyed the use he had for the SABC. […] if a man does that [elliptically left open, J.K.], you can never rely on him” (The Star, 2 July 1980). The dominant here frame disobedience as individual betrayal because they refuse to give an encompassing contextualization—while Harris instead cites his professional ethos and national identity as guiding his actions, in contrast to a supposedly all-important corporate identity. He stated as a matter of fact:

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

395

I never saw myself as a political activist. I was a filmmaker. I was a South African, and as such I felt the duty and the right to make films about what was happening in South Africa (Interview Harris, 29 January 2020).

His benchmark within the field of production was the work of other colleagues from the English documentary department. He intimated how he had admired the senior colleagues and their work. He narrated how it hurt to see, how one by one they just stood up and said we can’t take that anymore and […] left—so when they came to my turn […] and the whole instructions came that I must cut it et cetera, I thought if I compromise on such a small thing, how can I go forward as a film-maker? (Interview Harris, 29 January 2020).

While the colleagues left on their own, Harris was the only one being fired—and reacted with that “slight bit of outrage” (Interview 29 January 2020) that brought him to the press.22 This emotional response of a subject in the receiving end of authority fuelled the will to challenge the state and its broadcaster’s authority in the years to come.23 The decision to disobey the SABC and then to accuse the organization of dependence on external (i.e. Broederbond) hierarchies earmarked Harris for productions with NGOs, opposition party representatives or others defying the status quo. Although even oppositional politicians encouraged him to leave for the UK and continue as filmmaker there, he stayed on as he found his mission in a work within the country itself. The South African Council of 22  Another former SABC journalist/media scholar, Graham Hayman, said about the SABC’s first years of television that even the few graduates from the London Film School, who were there in South African TV’s early years were “cut-off” by the leading persons in the corporation, “certainly they bargained for a settling down period, a screening period after which all the mavericks would leave” (Tomaselli and Tomaselli 1989, p. 114). 23  The new medium created new professions and Harris, considered an expert, got elected as the General Secretary of the South African Film Technicians Association after his dismissal. The organization he “set about transforming—to the horror of the majority of the members who were white, conservative film technicians working mainly in the Commercials Industry & who were solely concerned with protecting their own job security […] so that, for example—when video activists were detained much later during the States of Emergency in 1985/86—as Gen Sec of SAFTA, I sent a telegram to the Minister of Law & Order demanding the release of a video-activist who had been held in detention-without-trial for some time. As a result, he was released within days” (Harris, personal communication, 2 April 2020).

396 

J. KOCH

Churches, under the new leadership of Desmond Tutu, became Harris’ professional safe haven. Harris narrated how he convinced them that what they needed was a documentary about themselves and what they were doing […] so they could also show their donor partners from overseas, but also, we could take that film and we could fight the censor-board here in South Africa to see through the church networks (Interview 29 January 2020).

He deliberately set out to produce “propaganda” and build up the authority of Desmond Tutu and the South African Council of Churches. In order to do so, he would always prefer the stylistics of feature-length films, not documentary as such because this is “how you influence people, that’s how you reach audiences that wouldn’t watch your film if they knew what it was about. So you change perceptions, shift mindsets” (Interview 29 January 2020).

6   New Media, New Authorities The knowledge that the South African public attributed to Doktor Verwoerd had been that of science—understood as logical, rational, precise and modern—and the public discourse about Verwoerd and his career serve as prime example for the conversion of symbolic capital and the mediation of authority on a person’s way through different careers. As media anthropologist Dorle Dracklé (1996) has underlined, syntactic rules and patterns of discourse contain their own representation of significance. They organize reality as a world without contradictions, for example through nominalization, passivation or abstracts—and, I would add in the South African case, through ellipsis. Comparable to the blank spots in South African territory, where homelands were to disappear from South African maps, the Nationalist Party leaders’ silence concerning Black people’s living conditions created a discourse of stability and predictability. Verwoerd’s command of the print industry arguably instilled Afrikaner pride within his readership and forwarded ‘sublime nationalism’ while his persuasive rhetoric as professor and designer of grand schemes created a dense network of information on social issues that claimed truth through (deductive) logics. The mediated authorities of himself, the National Party and the state could be traced through all four criteria Herbst (2003) has set up, and the mediations resonated and reinforced each other.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

397

Confronting this style of myth-making, Thompson diagnosed in 1962 that the “capacity for formulating and pursuing a rational goal become[s] vitiated by illusion” (1962, p. 125)—in this case, the illusion of omnipotence, total control and untouchable or moral autarchy. In the late 1970s, the legitimization process kept in motion by Nationalist Party rule had lost its direction and conviction for journalists and documentarists like Harris who mediated that delegitimization in the shape of a new logic on the most prominent medium of that time, the state broadcaster’s television programme—and newspapers widely recognized his moral legitimacy to do so. He showed the township’s “sociological and environmental deficiencies” as Soweto was “prepared as dormitory city for temporary sojourners from the homelands” but then became “sprawling home to one million urban Blacks” (Harris 1979, 0:36–0:43 min). The presentation of the hospital, as celebratory as it was in itself, could only highlight the incongruency of the legal and the life-­ world dimensions and delegitimate the authorities shaping the former. Harris knew how to use the syntactic rules and patterns of documentary filmmaking that allow for contradictions or productive tensions between voice, sound and image. A powerful “discourse of sobriety” (Nichols 1991, p. 25), mediated through the voice(s), meets highly unusual images and repeatedly hymn-like music that affect a receptive audience. Bara betrayed the Nationalist Party’s rhetoric of the beneficence of afsonderlikke ontwikkeling and, instead of a group-related narrative of ‘survival’, presented the benefits of ‘inter-racial’ cooperation in concrete life-or-­ death quests in hospital. While Bara mediated sobriety and dialogue on the SABC airwaves, Harris mediated his emotional response to the aftermath, the outrage caused by the dismissal, through receptive newspapers. The practice effects show the fragility of the discourse of balance in a social situation so blatantly skewed in favour of one group. The narratives—firstly of a hospital administrative leader who objected to nothing but the absence of luxury cars in the opening scenes and, secondly the cardiologist’s objection to the celebratory reporting on the hospital—highlight the polysemy of ‘balance’ in documentarism. The silences made public in the long tail of reporting on the events, such as the existence of luxury cars in Soweto, the hospital’s inadequacies or the Broederbond network’s presence and its illegitimate encroachment on content, highlight the contingency of secrecy and doubt and shifts in significance that Bara set in motion. Viewers’—particularly unexperienced viewers’—conspicuously realist presumptions on

398 

J. KOCH

documentary films opened the road for a new discursive ‘world’ broadcast on television. The promise of documentary film is, after all, that the profilmic event shot and the historical world are congruent with each other. This new world of Bara strangely resembled South Africa as White South Africans knew it, but the combination of audio and visual impressions allowed for a subtle, hard to pinpoint expression of dissent, rarely perceived before and probably not expected from the SABC. Within a documentary’s discourse of sobriety, Verwoerdism could be beaten on its own turf of verbosity, silence and silencing. With the didactic aim of showing the Whites what was done in their name, Harris used television as a mirror, not as a window. The technique of setting a carefully modulated professional reading of a written text as backdrop to documentary images visual anthropologists discussed as ‘voice-of-God’ (cf. Nichols 1983). Voice-over allows for the conveyance of a high amount of data hardly to be gained from interviews or filmed conversations, which are possibly fragmented and always carry a subjective note. The continuity of the voice of the commentary offers a sense of “history, context or perspective that viewers seek” (Nichols 1983, p.  17). In the case at hand, the voice-over is seamlessly intertwined with other peoples’ voices reducing the subjectivity of their accounts, and when we hear a doctor, a social worker or a nurse explain various aspects of the hospital—but never see them—the ‘voice-of-God’ previously monopolized by the state is now collaboratively produced as a polyvocal whole. The very combination of voices embodies qualities of insight, scepticism, judgement and independence as a kind of alternative authority to define what is ‘balanced’ reporting emerges.

7   Conclusions I argued in this chapter that authority depends on mediation, hence the active communication of a power relation, in which the power of knowledge and the knowledge of power fall into one. Extending the analysis of Hayman and Tomaselli (1989a) and following Williams’ (2010) processual definition of moral legitimacy, I hold that it is insufficient to reduce power to its placement within an ‘apparatus’ of media production as the mediation itself calls for further practices which are principally non-­ determined and thus can challenge power. The question of the communicative possibilities inherent in television to destabilize government’s authority can therefore be answered with the practice-theoretical terms

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

399

offered by Bourdieu. The analysis of the events around Bara, read as a case of the practiced mediation of authority in late 1970s South Africa, showed television’s potential for an ambivalent, (un)controllable (de)stabilization of relations of authority—even under the eyes of nationalism’s vanguards in a core national institution.24 Congruently, during the interview in 2020, Harris would deny that the film was preaching dissent. With an ellipsis of his own, he said that “There’s nowhere where that film (-). It didn’t start the revolution for god’s sake!” Yet, what it did was to literally ‘bring home’ to White South Africans the message of the price Black people paid for White affluency, using the airtime of the state broadcaster in an unprecedented way. The intimacy of the televisual communication allowed for the ‘seizing’ of an Afrikaner perspective of independence as it doubted the concealment of the knowledge of social imbalances. The case of Verwoerdism and its denial of the permanency of an urban concentration of Black people corroborate “that people consequently use the strategic ambiguity of the public secret as a mechanism of social control or to perpetuate the status quo in the face of historical injustices” (Jones 2014, p. 57). In Verwoerdism, to talk about urbanized Black people was to talk about danger which, in turn, justified the authoritarian state. The discussion of Verwoerd’s personality, globally spread by a plethora of friends and foes alike, relied on his intellect, his verbosity and his stubborn self-righteousness, ignoring the incongruencies of his logics. From a stance which legitimately claimed the viewpoint of the Whole, this became an idiosyncratic mixture of verbosity and precise lies. Broadcast television proved a useful analytic lens to look at the interplay of public secrets and authority within the Verwoerdian surfeit of information because it shed light on the close link between the production and the mediation, hence the formation of an alternative authority. State broadcasting set the agenda for discourse as it directed not what should be thought, but more importantly what should be thought about and what could be left unattended or forgotten (Connerton 2008). The events around the production and broadcasting of Bara and, in particular, of Harris’ active medialization or public communication of his dismissal, exemplify my overall argument. On the level of actors, challenges to governments’ mediated secrecy and legitimacy arose once a new kind of legitimate(d) producer of public knowledge accumulated and cited 24  For a comparatively reactionary perspective on the changes in the SABC’s news reporting and exegesis, see Bothma (1988).

400 

J. KOCH

authoritative sources to communicate the predicament arising from the secret. The combined authority of doctors and medical staff and Harris’ authority derived from the locally rare mastery of filmmaking questioned the state’s way of ordering affairs and rendering interdependence and the receiving end of the power relations invisible. Thus, the two aspects of perceptions Jones identified in the mediation of secrecy, apply: Revelatory and initiatory practices within secretive activities are often carefully calibrated to induce a sense of risk […], yet the experience of acquiring secrets can also produce confidence […] and trust (Jones 2014, p. 54).

South African journalists from critical newspapers describe the sense of risk in their work during the 1970s and 1980s most colourfully, while their confidence and self-confidence is palpable as well (Interview Peter Bayer, former Rand Daily Mail sub-editor, 10 April 2020). Harris risked his job at the SABC for the communication of a “revelation” and enhanced his own confidence during the production process. He would not lend the legitimacy of his position to the legitimization of the state’s policies. On the level of media practice, Harris’ experience of being summoned, disobeying and being subsequently dismissed mirrors the Broederbond’s power over SABC positions as well as its lack of authority to further maintain certain secrecies in the new medium. The self-styled ‘vanguard’ of Afrikaner nationalism had become relegated to a position of defence, incapable of securing the line between knowledge and secret in time. As Jones said, it was worth to look at the media through which social relations involving secrecy are transacted (Jones 2014, p. 53) because here, secrecy was not an easy bag to travel with from one medium to another. Within a practice-theoretical perspective derived from a selective reading of Bourdieu’s works on bureaucracy and cultural production, I thus showed the relationality of mediated authority.

References Balstad Miller, Roberta (1993). Science and Society in the Early Career of H. F. Verwoerd. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 19 (4), pp. 634–661. Bosch, David J. (1986). Afrikaner Civil Religion and the Current South African Crisis. In: Transformation, 3 (2), pp. 23–30.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

401

Bothma, Louis Johannes (1988). Kommentaar sonder grense. Die SAUK … en die storie daaragter. Pretoria: Oranjewerkers. Bourdieu, Pierre / Johnson, Randal (2011). The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. (First published in 1993) New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre / Wacquant, Loic J. D. / Farage, Samar (1994). Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field. In: Sociological Theory, 12 (1), pp. 1–18. Connerton, Paul (2008). Seven Types of Forgetting. In: Memory Studies, 1 (1), pp. 59–71. Crapanzano, Vincent (1986). Waiting: The Whites of South Africa. (First published in 1985) London: Paladin Grafton Books. Dracklé, Dorle (1996). Discourse Analysis in Anthropology. In: Van Bremen, Jan / Godina, Vesna / Platenkamp, Jos (Eds.), Horizons of Understanding: An Anthology of Theoretical Anthropology in Europe. Leiden: Leiden Research School CNWS, pp. 24–42. Dubow, Saul (2014). Apartheid, 1948–1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giliomee, Hermann (2012). The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Giliomee, Hermann (2003). The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Hall, Stuart (2006). Encoding/Decoding. In: Durham, Meenakshi Gigi / Kellner, Douglas (Eds.), Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 163–173. Hannerz, Ulf (2010). Anthropology’s World: Life in a Twenty-First Century Discipline. London: Pluto Press. Harris, Kevin (1996). SABC TV – 20 Years: The Untold Story. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzyJgI-­qA-­s. Harris, Kevin (1979). Bara – Kevin Harris – 1979. Retrieved from www.youtube. com/watch?v=3C2I-­dxECCg&t=2663s. Harrison, Randall / Ekman, Paul (1976). TV’s Last Frontier: South Africa. In: Journal of Communication, 26 (1), pp. 102–109. Hayman, Graham / Tomaselli, Ruth (1989a). Broadcasting Technology as an Ideological Terrain. Some Concepts, Assumptions and Problems. In: Tomaselli, Ruth / Tomaselli, Keyan G. / Muller, Johan (Eds.), Currents of Power: State Broadcasting in South Africa. Bellville: Anthropos, pp. 1–22. Hayman, Graham / Tomaselli, Ruth (1989b). Ideology and Technology in the Growth of South African Broadcasting, 1924–1971. In: Tomaselli, Ruth / Tomaselli, Keyan G. / Muller, Johan (Eds.), Currents of Power: State Broadcasting in South Africa. Bellville: Anthropos, pp. 23–83. Hepple, Alexander (1967). Verwoerd. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

402 

J. KOCH

Herbst, Susan (2003). Political Authority in a Mediated Age. In: Theory and Society, 32, pp. 480–503. Herzfeld, Michael (2009). The Performance of Secrecy: Domesticity and Privacy in Public Spaces. In: Semiotica, 2009 (175), pp. 135–162. Horwitz, Robert Britt (2001). Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Graham M. (2014). Secrecy. In: Annual Review of Anthropology, 43 (1), pp. 53–69. Kenney, Henry (1980). Architect of Apartheid  – H.F.  Verwoerd: An Appraisal. Johannesburg: Ball Koch, Julia (2019). Fieldwork as Performance: Being Ethnographic in FilmMaking. In: Anthropology Southern Africa, 42 (2), pp. 161–172. Koch, Julia (2017). South Asian Muslim Women on the Move: Missionaries in South Africa. In: South Asian Diaspora, 9 (2), pp. 129–146. Marx, Christoph (2020). Trennung und Angst: Hendrik Verwoerd und die Gedankenwelt der Apartheid. Oldenburg: De Gruyter. Marx, Christoph (1993). Hendrik Verwoerd and the Leipzig School of Psychology in 1926. In: Historia, 58 (2), pp. 91–118. Newbury, Darren / Sachs, Albie (2009). Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press. Nichols, Bill (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nichols, Bill (1983). The Voice of Documentary. In: Film Quarterly, 36 (3), pp. 17–30. O’Meara, Dan (1977). The Afrikaner Broederbond 1927–1948: Class Vanguard of Afrikaner Nationalism. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 3 (2), pp. 156–186. Orgeret, Kristin Skare (2015). From ‘The Devil in the Black Box’ to a Nation-­ Building Tool: Early TV in South Africa – A New Medium for a New Nation. In: Anderson, Stewart / Chakars, Melissa (Eds.), Modernization, Nation-­ Building, and Television History. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 187–208. Orgeret, Kristin Skare (2009). Television News, The South African Post-Apartheid Experience: Continuity and Change in the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation). Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller. Orlik, Peter B. (1968). South African Broadcasting Corporation: An Historical Survey and Contemporary Analysis. Dissertation. Wayne State University Michigan. Ortner, Sherry B. (2010). Access: Reflections on Studying Up in Hollywood. In: Ethnography, 11 (2), pp. 211–233. Posel, Deborah (2009). The Assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd: The Spectre of Apartheid’s Corpse. In: African Studies, 68 (3), pp. 331–350.

  SECRECY AND VISIBILITY 

403

Posel, Deborah (1987). The Meaning of Apartheid Before 1948: Conflicting Interests and Forces within the Afrikaner Nationalist Alliance. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 14 (1), pp. 123–139. Postill, John (2017). The Diachronic Ethnography of Media. From Social Changing to Actual Social Changes. In: Moment Journal, 4 (1), pp. 19–43. Rosenthal, Eric (1974). You Have Been Listening to… The Early History of Radio in South Africa. Cape Town: Purnell. Schatzki, Theodore R. (2006). On Organizations as they Happen. In: Organization Studies, 27 (12), pp. 1863–1873. Seekings, Jeremy (2008). The Carnegie Commission and the Backlash against Welfare State-Building in South Africa, 1931–1937. In: Journal of Southern African Studies, 34 (3), pp. 515–537. Simmel, Georg (1906). The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stultz, Newell (1969). The Politics of Security: South Africa under Verwoerd, 1961–6. In: The Journal of Modern African Studies, 7 (1), pp. 3–20. Ulrich, Nicole (2016). From Servants to British Subjects: Citizenship, Khoesan Labour, and the Making of the Modern Colonial State, 1652–1815. In: Hunter, Emma (Ed.), Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa: Dialogue Between Past and Present. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, pp. 43–73. Union of South Africa (1959). Promotion of Bantu Self-Governing Act, Act No. 46, dated June 19, 1959. Retrieved from https://www.aluka.org/stable/10.5555/AL.SFF.DOCUMENT.leg19590619.028.020.046. Tomaselli, Ruth / Tomaselli, Keyan G. / Muller, Johan (Eds.) (1989). Currents of Power: State Broadcasting in South Africa. Bellville: Anthropos. Tomaselli, Keyan / Tomaselli, Ruth (1989). Between Policy and Practice in the SABC, 1970–1981. In: Tomaselli, Ruth / Tomaselli, Keyan G. / Muller, Johan (Eds.), Currents of Power: State Broadcasting in South Africa. Bellville, South Africa: Anthropos, pp. 84–152. Thompson, Leonard M. (1985). The Political Mythology of Apartheid. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Thompson, Leonard M. (1962). Afrikaner Nationalist Historiography and the Policy of Apartheid. In: Journal of African History, 3 (1), pp. 25–141. Du Toit, André (1985). Puritans in Africa? Afrikaner ‘Calvinism’ and Kuyperian Neo-Calvinism in Late Nineteenth-Century South Africa. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History, 27 (2), pp. 209–240. Wilkins, Ivor / Strydom, Hans (1980). The Super-Afrikaners. (First published in 1978) Johannesburg: Ball. Williams, J.  Michael (2010). Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

404 

J. KOCH

Wolf, Loammi (2012). David Beresford Pratt: Die mens agter die sluipmoordpoging. In: Litnet Akademies: ‘n Joernaal vir die Geesteswetenskappe, Natuurwetenskappe, Regte en Godsdienswetenskappe, 9 (3), pp. 743–804. Zeitlyn, David (2012). Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts – Archives as Anthropological Surrogates. In: Annual Review in Anthropology, 41, pp. 461–480.

Who Calls the Tune? Submission, Evasion, and Contesting Authorities in Ethiopian Refugee Camps Magnus Treiber and Mulu Getachew Abebe

1   Introduction For most Eritrean refugees, who fled intolerable uncertainty and repression in remarkable numbers since the Ethiopian-Eritrean border war of 1998–2000 and the subsequent political crisis, residence in one of the camps in northern Ethiopia has been a disturbing experience. Hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have, since that war and that crisis, crossed into Ethiopia, with many travelling onwards to other destinations (these include the Mediterranean, reached via Sudan and Libya, or Uganda, South Sudan, Angola, Kenya, and South Africa). Those who went on from Ethiopia either left through informal means, or else were able to access

M. Treiber (*) Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. G. Abebe Department of Social Anthropology, College of Social Sciences, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6_15

405

406 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

formal resettlement in a host country after years of waiting and uncertainty. In 2007, for example, Magnus Treiber witnessed the new arrival of refugees at the Shimelba refugee camp, where they had come from the Endabaguna screening centre: they were relieved to have survived a risky escape, and fully ready motivated to start a new life—at least, as soon as that might be possible. They were, therefore, ‘all smiles’, a strong contrast with inmates of the camp, who did not smile at all (cf. Treiber and Tesfaye 2008). Mulu Getachew Abebe has observed similar patterns during the regular visits she has made to friends and informants in Mai Ayni, Adi Harush and Hitsats since 2010. There, over the years, she has seen their optimism, energy, and health decline, erode and vanish. Expectations of immediate relief and effective organisation of legal onward migration have not been met. Instead, newcomers were declared refugees and parked in the camp, although initially quite strict restrictions on mobility and access to education have eased somewhat since Ethiopia’s adoption of an out-of-­ camp policy in 2010 (Samuel Hall Consulting 2014) and the (nominal) legalisation of refugee access to work and education in 2019 (Betts et al. 2019). Then, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed would win the 2018 Nobel Prize for Peace due to his peace offer to Eritrea and his policy of reconciliation. Despite the fact that Eritrean refugees found that their freedom of movement opened up somewhat after these developments, there was little or no change to the procedural path by which they are accepted in Ethiopia. Nor did Ethiopia’s new course put an end to mass emigration from Eritrea (Tesfaye and Gebrehiwot 2020). While air travel between both countries went on—a privileged and strictly controlled form of mobility—Eritrea closed its borders again after only a few months, fearing the uncontrollable outflow of national service recruits, a population so broad it includes youths of both sexes and men in their 50s. What certainly changed, however, was Eritrean refugees’ common perception of Ethiopia. Having previously perceived that country as a safe destination, they then found their position there far more ambiguous. For a better understanding of migration’s changing conditions and Ethiopia’s refugee policy between the preliminary end of the border war in December 2000 and renewed war in Tigray two decades later in November 2020, it may be useful to pragmatically distinguish three different phases: first, the years 2000 to 2010, when refugee mobility was strictly controlled; second, the years from 2010 to 2018, when refugees could profit from Ethiopia’s out-­ of-­ camp policy or became urban refugees; and third, the transitional period under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his policy of reconciliation

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

407

and alliance with Ethiopia’s difficult northern neighbour. While formal protection, at least, could be relied upon as long as Eritrea and Ethiopia were enemy countries, peace brought up unexpected dynamics and increased uncertainty and the feeling of insecurity among Eritrean refugees, instead of raising their optimism and confidence of accessing international protection and assistance, and enhancing their personal futures. The eventual outbreak of war in 2020, between the Tigray regional government on the one side and Ethiopia’s federal government on the other, confirmed all reservation. Eritrean newcomers to Ethiopian refugee camps may originate from different ethnic backgrounds, be highlanders or lowlanders, and follow Islam or Christian denominations. As Eritrean nationals they grew up in an atmosphere of uncertainty, mistrust, and suffering. While progressive guerrilla doctrine never fully changed Eritrea’s predominantly patriarchal and gender-conservative family structures, ongoing militarisation, tight political control, and year-long national service have undermined family relations and kinship responsibilities in rural as well as in urban areas. Subsequently, young Eritreans experienced the vanishing authority of their fathers or uncles and its replacement by that of a distant and opaque government. Although many have dear childhood memories and not all have experienced personal mistreatment, all have had to learn to survive under arbitrary rule and to silently obey malevolent henchmen and superiors. “It’s just politics,” was a common saying during Magnus Treiber’s fieldwork in Asmara in the years following the border war, one that associated politics with irrationality and lack of transparency, selfishness, manipulation, and corruption (2017, p. 39). A major lesson of life in such a constantly insecure environment was to obey the state when needed while evading contact with that state whenever possible, to avoid contradicting any person and—most importantly—to avoid trusting any person. This informal, but effective, guideline was imported into the camp and applied in contacts with authorities and agencies. It was also adhered to in relations with co-­ migrants who were numbered among those who could not be trusted. Logically, the refugee camp was beyond Eritrean territory and not under immediate Eritrean control. It provided detainees, however, with a modified reality, one more complex and partially unknown. Within that reality, inmates of the camp had to orient themselves to multiple, formal or informal authorities with different standing and scope demanded quick orientation. An older generation that could give advice and orientation or

408 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

clear-cut orders was generally absent, and long-standing and more experienced inmates transmitted insider knowledge to newcomers only with reluctance. Without that knowledge, certain vital questions could not be answered. Whom to obey—and if necessary—whom to evade and how? From whom to expect help and support? How to present oneself, how to build up personal ties and make use of potential influence? Moreover, maybe the most important, whom to trust at all? In a recent book, migration from Eritrea into the wider world has been interpreted as an unprivileged process of learning from below, one that leads to informal praxis and existential pressure (Treiber 2017). In this chapter, we will shed a light on refugee arrival in Ethiopia since the end of the border war in 2000 and subsequent mass migration from Eritrea. Inside the camp—be it Shimelba, Mai Ayni, Adi Harush or Hitsats, all in Ethiopia’s Tigray Province—new and yet unknown structures of authority had to be identified and dealt with. Who called the tune in this obscure field of governmental and non-­ governmental, national and international institutions, formal and informal groups and actors? We use selected empirical examples to understand how Eritrean refugees perceived and addressed formal as well as informal actors in Ethiopia’s refugee camps and how they tried to evaluate their respective authority and potential (Inhetveen 2010, pp. 391–400). Of course, this inevitable learning process (uneasy and asymmetric though it was) built very strongly upon refugees’ previous lives in Eritrea, on their social knowledge of authority and power acquired under dictatorial rule, and its accompanying habitus (Bourdieu 1990; Treiber 2018). This fundamentally subjective and, at the same time, collectively shared perspective from below shaped and limited their stance towards actors and authorities in an unknown place. Furthermore, actors and authorities in the isolated refugee camps in northern Ethiopia found that their character changed and that they won or lost agency and power in accordance with the dynamics of regional and global politics and policies. As a result, they could not rely on a fixed order or hierarchy of actors in the camp, which was itself a crossroads of national and international authorities, a zone of governmental and non-­ governmental interventions, and a site for both formal and informal actors. We will briefly look into the fundamentals of political authority in Eritrea, as well as into the ‘political order’ of the refugee camp (Inhetveen 2010; cf. Malkki 1995), and also its “economy of power relations” (Foucault 1982, p. 779). General ideas about authority and authoritarianism will be provided by Arendt (1961), Adorno (1997), Foucault (1982, 1979), as

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

409

well as Bernstein and Coleman (2009). Our ethnographic approach looks at the enmeshment of individual fate and preliminary arrival; transnationally connected local, regional, and global spheres; means of communication; political context and its contested perception and impact. In this chapter, we sketch camp life’s inevitable uncertainty and refugees’ subsequent “process of minding” (Whyte 2009, p.  13), make use of Henrik Vigh’s idea of social navigation as a case of “moving on moving ground” (2009), and take into account recent debates on connectivity (Horden 2012; Scheele 2019) and the reconsidered social (Ingold 2018; Jackson 2017).

2   The Setting: Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I was a clever political actor and an able diplomat. Not only did he manage to re-establish feudal rule over the Ethiopian highlands after Allied troops ousted Italian fascism from the Horn of Africa, he also obtained US support for his claim to the former Italian colony of Eritrea. In 1952 under United Nations supervision, Eritrea became an autonomous territory federated with the Ethiopian crown. A decade later it would become Ethiopia’s most northern province, after political protests for the retention of Eritrean autonomy were crushed. Consequent resistance by Eritrean Muslim lowlanders and, later on, also from the predominantly Christian Eritrean highlands became increasingly militant. It would, eventually, lead to the defeat of the derg, the military regime (1974–1991), which had ruled Ethiopia after Haile Selassie’s time. That defeat was the work of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), a national liberation movement, established and run in a deliberately Maoist tradition, whose common nickname shaebia (or šaʽbiya), means ‘popular’ in Arabic. It took over the administration of liberated areas of Eritrea prior to its overall military victory in 1991, and it continued its style of guerrilla rule after formal independence in 1993. As Eritrea’s present government, it controls ‘mass unions’ of women, youths, and workers, as well as the military and security apparatus. In the late 1990s, the country’s president Isaias Afeworki fell out with his Ethiopian counterpart prime minister Meles Zenawi, a former leader of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), with which the EPLF shared a difficult and mixed relationship. Both movements had roots in the revolutionary

410 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

student milieu that grew up at Addis Ababa University in the 1970s. From that point onwards fundamental disputes on nation and ethnicity between the groups unfolded into substantial military cooperation, but led, ultimately, towards rupture, rivalry, and mistrust. By the late 1990s, Ethiopia was again perceived in Eritrea as enemy-territory, as a country propelled by unappeasable imperialist appetite—no matter who ruled there. In 1998, a devastating war between both countries was launched with contemptuous propaganda, displaced millions and killed, wounded or crippled hundreds of thousands of young people on both sides (Negash and Tronvoll 2000). Besides the exodus of many Kunama agro-pastoralists and a few military deserters, mass migration from Eritrea only started after President Isaias Afeworki’s crackdown on private media and an emerging student-movement at Asmara University as well as his purge of internal dissidents in 2001. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Eritrean citizens have illegally crossed the heavily guarded border—and most often at the river Mereb—despite the considerable risk involved and the rather ambivalent prospect of defecting to one’s archenemy (Abebe 2019). Most of the refugees were young adults deserting coercive national service (Kibreab 2017) or under-age students avoiding forced conscription. The despotic rule of the ‘stick’ (Treiber 2018, p. 58) and constant insecurity (Bozzini 2015), public knowledge of inhuman treatment in the prisons and the armed forces, militarisation of the educational system (Riggan 2016) and persistent crisis due to political isolation, opaque command economy (Plaut 2016, pp. 133–148), increasing everyday corruption and impoverishment: these were all reasons enough to leave (Hirt and Mohammad 2013; O’Kane and Hepner 2011). Illegal border-crossing entailed risky and often expensive arrangements with daring smugglers, who could not guarantee success but whom you had to trust somehow, in a social environment of mistrust and unease. According to our informants, Eritrean prisons are full of apprehended runaways (Treiber 2018, pp.  58–59), while an unknown number of border crossers have been shot without much ado. Staying behind, however, was rarely an option; hopes and expectations of a better life were directing people elsewhere (Treiber 2017). David Pool has described the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front as a “frame of steel” (2001, p. 105). Certainly, conducting a guerrilla struggle against the Soviet-backed derg military could allow for neither dysfunction nor endless debate. The EPLF won legitimacy—the broad backing of its leadership’s decisions and actions by members and supporters (cf. Bernstein and Coleman 2009, p.  6)—through its overall goal to win

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

411

independence, establish self-rule, and lay the fundamentals of future peace and prosperity. Its practical performance—military efficiency and success, proto-governmental administration of liberated territory, and uncontested monopoly on violence—proved its capability and credibility. Its fighters and followers therefore accepted its leadership and decisions, including corrections and punishment. The ideological model was simple: the EPLF was the Eritrean nation’s avant-garde, its leadership expressed the will of the people. Critics who crossed the imaginary line separating what, in the EPLF’s rituals of critique and self-critique, could be said from what should remain unsaid risked ending up as ‘enemies of the people’. As Mao Tse-­ Tung decreed for the EPLF’s role model, the Chinese Communist Party, “[T]he individual is subordinate to the organization” (1967, p.  204). Once this doctrine had been chosen and found useful, further intellectual debate was avoided, even suspected of breeding discord and factionalism. After Eritrea’s first nationalist guerrilla and the EPLF’s arch-rival, the older Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), had effectively been driven out of the country in 1980, no one doubted the EPLF’s commitment or dared to question its overall goal of national independence and social progress. When the Eritrean president, the front’s former secretary-general, staged his coup-d’état from above and imprisoned prominent EPLF comrades and leading figures of Eritrea’s political scene, he turned an authoritarian leadership into dictatorial rule. According to Hannah Arendt, “the source of authority in authoritarian government” is always an “external force which transcends the political realm, from which the authorities derive their ‘authority,’ that is their legitimacy, and against which their power can be checked” (1961, p. 97). In this sense, Isaias Afeworki’s manoeuvre had a twofold character. Once again, he could refer to the nation’s independence, jeopardised by traitors of the common cause. By misusing the nation’s collectivist myth for his obvious grab for power, however, he dismantled the last argument for common support and identification with authoritarian rule and opted for open oppression instead. “[W]here force is used, authority itself has failed”, and—sticking to Arendt’s terminology—tyranny begins (1961, p. 63). Violence had always been part of the EPLF and the newly independent state, but now the president’s crackdown appeared less blurred by national myth and the ideology of the liberation struggle. The power struggle had been won, but in a way the remaining clique lost much of its previous legitimacy. Open opposition or even resistance entailed brutal repression, while inner detachment and evasion occasionally demanded submission to order and despotism. The

412 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

latter option required people to remain silent, to deny solidarity and—for national service recruits and older public servants—to participate to various degrees in policy implementation and acts of injustice. This political culture of violence had an ambivalent effect. On the one hand, it created a clear-cut separation between ‘them’, shaebia leaders and explicit followers, and the rest of a seemingly involuntarily involved population. Perpetrators, like the military drill sergeant, the cruel prison guard, the heartless supervisor, or the mean informer, have become typical icons of Eritrea’s post-revolutionary society—assisting the assimilation of the individual into the national collective (cf. Adorno 1997, p.  16; Theweleit 1980). “They” appeared as the ultimate other, their dominion as monolithic. On the other hand, moral guilt of one’s own involvement and collaboration was suppressed and—as public debate was restricted—could not be openly expressed and discussed. This shared, yet unquestioned experience provided an effective social glue (cf. Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 2009). The young nation state’s totalising, yet individualising power dynamics—a political “double-bind” (Foucault 1982, p. 785)— sedimented in a common and cross-generational Eritrean habitus that was subsequently taken into migration and the diaspora. Outside Eritrea, however, actors and their agendas were many and unknown, and political constellations were changing. Tsega was a young mother from the southern highlands. Her husband had set out into migration some time ago and had finally reached Libya, following a pattern that is almost typical of Eritrean refugee flight. During their telephone conversations they agreed on Tsega’s escape. Unluckily, Tsega got caught twice. On both occasions, soldiers fired at her group. During her second attempt more than 90 people tried to make use of Eritrea’s Independence Day, May 24, but were arrested south of Mendefera. As a mother, Tsega could be bailed out once. The second time she was imprisoned for three months and had to serve as a cook in a military unit. To be caught for a third time would have meant an unbearable financial burden and a prison sentence of at least six months. In a village close to the border she paid some fees to be shown a safe path bypassing Eritrean border posts. In an interview after arrival she tells the story of her escape: I dressed up like the people in the area and carried a bag that people in that area carry. I had had my hair braided so I just looked like the people there. My son was walking – I didn’t carry him. We walked slowly, just pretending

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

413

like we are the people of that area, and because there were many small towns there. We would see the soldiers and greet them ‘how is your day?’ and go on so we really looked like the people from that area. But I was so scared inside. I got to the last point, the church, because the guy had told me that after the church I have to run. So I went into the church and prayed and then from there, I ran. I carried my son and ran here. Well, it is such an amazing story actually. I was just walking [at random] when coming here, because I know nothing. Then two kids found me, they were shepherds. They found me and they told me to stop. And they said ‘stop’, but I ignored them and continued walking, but then they had an axe in their hand and again shouted at me ‘stop’. They didn’t have the same accent as mine, when they spoke Tigrigna, but still I didn’t know so I was a bit scared and therefore I stopped. And they asked me ‘Where are you going?’ and I said ‘Forward’ and they said, ‘Where to?’ and I said, ‘to Ethiopia’. I saw a military camp in front of me, but I didn’t know, whether it was Eritrean or Ethiopian. So I was afraid, thinking ‘Oh no! These are ours’. I asked them ‘what is this place called?’ and they said to me ‘Assab’ [one of Eritrea’s two seaports]. ‘So is this Eritrea?’ I asked them again and they said ‘Yes [it is]. And the guy over there who is looking at you is a soldier’. I said ‘Oh no! Am I going to get caught again?’ and they said ‘yes’. I threw what I had in my hand and said to them ‘Should I run?’ and they said, ‘But they will fire at you’ and then I sat down like this and started to cry. When they saw me crying, one girl said to [the other] ‘Let’s tell her’ and then said ‘Hey, we are [just] kidding. You are in Ethiopia’, but I didn’t believe them. I was [simply] waiting for the soldier to come and get me, but he didn’t move. Then I told them to swear. This I will actually never forget: I asked one of them ‘What is your mother’s name?’ and he told me ‘Mana’ and I said, ‘Swear for me in Mana’s name’. He drew a cross on my hand and swore. ‘Really?’ I asked and hugged them and kissed them hard. Then he made this sound that they make as a sign for the soldiers. And I said ‘really, is this true?’ because I had heard that shepherds make that kind of sound to alert Eritrean soldiers, so I didn’t believe them until that point. They told me ‘Go up that hill and you will find the Ethiopian soldiers.’ So I climbed up, I was climbing running. It was a steep hill, so I just ran up and climbed. There I met with two women whose houses were there and I greeted them. Then I went further and there I saw the soldiers who were speaking in Amharic. So, that was it. (Tsega 2016, Personal interview by Mulu Getachew Abebe, Hitsats Refugee Camp)

To cross the border alive is only the first step. The ensuing geographical and biographical trajectories can rarely be planned and scheduled in detail. Beyond the refugee camps in northern Ethiopia, a world of opportunities

414 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

and restrictions promises to open up again, and is communicated, rumoured, and discussed among Eritrean migrants in different stations and at various stages of migration. The camp, however, provides a first and important lesson—the status of a refugee may hint at a brighter future elsewhere, but will deny its bearer any privileged freedom of action in the present. Beteseb, a friend and year-long informant in Magnus Treiber’s fieldwork, arrived in 2006, stayed for four long years in Shimelba refugee camp in northern Tigray Province, and spent another five years as an urban refugee in Addis Ababa. Once we met, he provocatively stated that Eritrea was a better place than Ethiopia. Facing surprise and disbelief, he explained: Eritreans in Eritrea still enjoyed the option of flight—a risky chance to take, but one that existed all the same. Once an Eritrean reached Ethiopia, however, this made him a refugee, condemned him to a state of dependence and mere passivity, stripped of the freedom to move and decide on his own. He lost hope only after reaching the refugee camp with its many actors—and no one to help.

3   Ambivalent Actors in the Camp and Throughout Political Transformations The refugee camp per se is a ‘disciplinary institution’ (Foucault 1979). Allied forces pragmatically used camps during World War II to house displaced persons and war refugees, and to enable practical care for these masses, but also to isolate and screen them, thus exercising over them forms of administrative, hygienic, and police control. In post-war times, the UNHCR and states who hosted larger refugee populations retained this model without much debate. However, critique of the inherent contradictions of ‘humanitarian government’ and the ethical incompatibility of protection, care, and proclaimed empowerment of refugees with their management, social segregation, and accommodation has become louder (Agier 2011; Harrell-Bond and Voutira 1992). With this historical background, the refugee camp is a place of order. Unlike the classical governmental institutions, such as the school, the prisons, or the military, however, the refugee camp brings together national and international authorities and agencies, as well as various non-governmental organisations. Always perceived as pragmatic, make-shift, and temporary, many notable refugee camps—Dadaab in Kenya, for example, or Shagarab in Sudan—have, since their establishment decades ago, developed their own

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

415

dynamics and permanence: they have, in fact, become informal urban and economic centres that integrate refugees with local citizens of the hosting state. In addition, as places which people will seek to eventually leave and leave permanently, they also attract migration’s informal economy, where informal onward journeys are brokered, and false documents are sold. Furthermore, political parties and opposition groups, striving for the control of people have identified refugee camps as ideal places to address many people and their specific needs at a time. [A]s a technology of power, the camp ended up being much more than a device of containment and enclosure; it grew into a locus of continual creative subversion and transformation. Just as Foucault has shown for prisons and clinics, the refugee camp as a technology of power was both limiting and productive. Within it, certain kinds of political action were possible, others impossible. Certain kinds of socio-political forms and processes, and certain kinds of objects and subjects, emerged while others did not. (Malkki 1995, p. 237)

Arrival at a refugee camp demanded new orientations, the evaluation of actors, and assessment of their agendas and potential—and then, on that basis, adequate action. For refugees from Eritrea these multiple actors, limited overview, and complex dynamics were challenging. 3.1  ARRA In the camps that hosted refugees from Eritrea, there was first of all the Ethiopian state and its formal administration and authorities. Although rightly contested, Ethiopia’s national myth self-confidently claims around 3000 years of continuity (Bulcha 1988, p. 33). In fact—and in contrast to most African states—Ethiopia built up an effective state administration throughout the twentieth century, which has survived several abrupt regime changes. So, the derg military junta under Mengistu Haile Mariam strongly built upon the previous, ousted, imperial regime’s centralism and its class of bureaucrats and technocrats. To increase control on a grass-root level the military regime successfully increased neighbourhood control through local kebele-administration in urban and peasant associations in rural areas, a model which was continued and further developed by the derg’s successor regime, that of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front or EPRDF (Clapham 2017, pp. 45–46, p. 66), led by

416 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

the TPLF. Before the most recent war in Tigray, ARRA, the Authority for Refugees and Returnees Affairs was the most dominant actor in Ethiopia’s refugee camps, charged with serving both Ethiopia’s humanitarian open-­ door policy as well as its intrinsic security concerns. ARRA exercised ultimate authority over the camp: it enforced refugee policies through its regional and district authorities, controlled everyday life in the refugee camps via collaboration with international agencies, NGOs, and refugee committees, and provided security and refugee surveillance. This task was, up until recently, assigned to Ethiopia’s National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS). New arrivals from Eritrea, like Tsega in our example above, were usually picked up by military posts close to the border and then screened and interrogated in the Endabaguna reception centre, before being sent to the camps in Shimelba, Mai Ayni, Adi Harush, or Hitsats. All formal requests and inquiries—formal interviews, ration cards, travel permits—had to pass through ARRA, an institution that refugees usually considered opaque and non-transparent, slow, and sometimes arrogant, and either incompetent or malevolent or both. While waiting eagerly to be called for an interview and considered for formal resettlement elsewhere, refugees faced ARRA first of all. It was there where much of their well-­ being and future was decided upon, and they viewed it with mistrust and sometimes hostility, but also with a spirit of pragmatism: certainly, it did not help to quarrel with ARRA and its staff. As all refugee camps were established in isolated and naturally delimited areas, ARRA’s personnel, all of whom were Ethiopian nationals, found themselves deployed to rather unattractive locations, far from their own families in Addis Ababa and other major towns. By no means were all of them TPLF-supporters or even former fighters, but they all had to deal with the highly political and, thus, personally risky constellations within an authoritarian state administration. For most of our informants throughout the years, it was hard to get into a more personal relationship with ARRA officials, who drew a clear line between them and their clients within the camps’ clearly segregated geography. Beteseb, however, found a trusting and long-standing friend in an ARRA official, Amaniel, who helped him obtain an urban refugee status and supervised his eventual onward migration to Australia after almost ten years of being trapped in the system. This exceptional relationship between civil servant and client was established with the help of their shared isolation within their respective social surroundings. Beteseb was a former EPLF-fighter and unwilling to be a part of Ethiopia’s propaganda machine, impeding his progress in the refugee process. Prior

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

417

to 2010, Ethiopia’s government was strictly led by the TPLF and was— understandably—fundamentally anti-Eritrean, and mistrustful of both the Eritrean regime and the incoming refugees. And while their joy at having escaped Eritrea was certainly overwhelming, newcomers from Eritrea quickly learned that the Ethiopian government was maybe not too different from their own. Prior to Abiy Ahmed’s rise to power, researchers regularly heard reports of refugees complaining about individuals’ perceived inability to remain neutral and confidential in the face of the heavily politicised situation and environment of the camp as well as ARRA’s obvious, though unofficial, support of selected Eritrean opposition groups (Harmon-Gross 2009; Treiber 2016). Amaniel, the official, who took over Beteseb’s case, was a high-ranking official, but he felt himself a stranger in this government authority, then predominantly run, as most authorities within the security apparatus were, by Tigrayans. Other than TPLF-supporters, he then did not perceive Eritreans as a security threat per se. With Abiy Ahmed’s emphatic call for democratic dialogue—medemer— and his dissolution of the long-standing EPRDF under TPLF rule, these once clear-cut constellations throughout the state’s administrative institutions and authorities were again broken up—with staff trying to wait and see which new political groups would attempt to take over, or defending their institutions from those groups. From a refugee perspective, official Ethiopia under TPLF’s dominion was not easy to deal with—particularly during the first phase of refugee influx after the war—but it looked somehow familiar to the Eritrean state, and the techniques of submission, mistrust, and evasion developed to deal with that state hardly provided any practical knowledge on how to act as dependents of the new regime. As turmoil unfolded under Abiy Ahmed’s rule, however, the central institutions of the state administration appeared to lose their orientation, changed their doctrines, and reassembled loyalties, and the Ethiopian public stumbled. For refugees this could only mean that their precarious, but relatively safe, status was eroded increasing their insecurity. What would happen to Eritrean refugees after Ethiopia and Eritrea finally signed a peace agreement? 3.2  UNHCR Other than ARRA, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was considered an essential tool to enter formal resettlement into a better

418 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

world elsewhere, but opacity and UNHCR’s slow bureaucratic processes led to frustration and anger. Despite what is commonly believed in the global North, the UNHCR is not in charge of the camps it co-­administrates with respective national authorities. During Magnus Treiber’s research in Shimelba, the UNHCR did not even have a permanent office in the camp but sent a national staff member twice a week for few office hours to the camp. Among many international ‘protection officers’, who had come and gone within relatively short periods—at least from the point of view of a refugee who has been eagerly waiting for an indefinite time—a single one had won the admiration of the camp population: this was ‘Mr. Taylor’, who had allegedly dared to take a stand against the dominant ARRA representative and speak out in favour of the camp inmates and their (at that time) strictly limited freedom. As he was American, rumours quickly spread that he was backed by the US government and its security apparatus. Otherwise, it was argued, why should ARRA take international UNHCR staff seriously—they would leave soon anyhow, and their national staff was of course suspected of being under the control of the Ethiopian government. Nevertheless, UNHCR was a decisive link between authoritarian Ethiopia and potential host countries, ready to accept the resettlement of fixed refugee contingents. To this end, it had to be accepted that the so-called international community represented by the UNHCR was either far less influential or far less interested in Eritrean refugees than expected. Thus, refugees learned soon after arrival that it seemed to be Eritrea’s fate throughout history to be ignored. Tesfaye quotes a typical complaint: “UNHCR is organising our lives. We didn’t ask them to do so. They are obviously not doing it well. So if they can’t do it, why don’t they let us do it?” (Tesfaye 2011, p. 31). Those refugees who were particularly young, educated, and eloquent, however, saw a chance to overcome passivity and powerlessness through the establishment of personal ties to international staff and, thereby, to attempt the manipulation of their cases. 3.3  NGOs Furthermore, NGOs, such as the International Rescue Committee (IRC) or the Norwegian Refugee Council, have been present in the camp, organising educational campaigns on gender-based violence, providing training in batik dyeing, or supporting poultry and livestock farming. This did not provide much preparation for future life elsewhere, but where general permission to work was lacking, NGOs at least offered jobs of some sort (e.g.

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

419

community social work in the camps’ gender-based-­violence-­programme), and personal contacts that might help to successfully claim special needs and to positively influence decision-making by ARRA and UNHCR. Certainly, pre-school and primary education, access to secondary schools and vocational training—now mainly provided via the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Development and Inter Church Aid Commission (DICAC)—has improved a lot since Ethiopia eased its strict and exclusionary policy towards Eritreans, and since thousands of youths have reached the shores of the European Union in 2015, leading to a heightened European interest in making Eritreans stay in Ethiopia (Riggan and Poole 2019a, b). Beyond their perceived inefficiency and growing scepticism towards the global North’s willingness to help, the presence of UNHCR and international NGOs in the camp provided at least access to international staff—very concrete connections into a better world out there—as well as to global human rights speak, which served to make oneself heard and demand efficient action in the global North’s own language. These are the formal actors and institutions in the camp, which apparently all develop informal dimensions in daily camp life. Three less institutionalised groups and types of actors have also to be mentioned: Eritrean opposition groups, the local population living in the surroundings and beyond, and migration’s inevitable brokers and smugglers. 3.4  Eritrean Opposition Groups Under Meles Zenawi (1991–2012), the Ethiopian government had already changed its policy towards Eritrean refugees, beginning to see them not as a mere threat to Ethiopian security but as a potential political tool with which to establish, host, and influence the political asset of a working Eritrean opposition. Refugee youths were encouraged to build up political parties, which successively also opened up offices in Addis Ababa. Of course, these groups had to adopt EPRDF’s ethnic federalism as a model and line up more or less explicitly along ethnic lines—a deliberate alternative to the ageing and isolated ELF-splinter groups existing since the 1980s in the Sudan and elsewhere. The Ethiopian government did not publicly advertise its nonetheless obvious support for those groups, but Mulu Getachew Abebe once witnessed a big amplifier in the centre of one of the camps. The broadcasted programme called ‘we and our future’, raised various issues for discussion, but also agitated against the Eritrean regime. This programme stopped with Abiy Ahmed’s takeover. On

420 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

numerous occasions, we were able to hear complaints by refugees against opposition groups, who proselytised in the camps to maximise membership, while relatively few seemed willing to become involved in opposition politics. There were some obvious reasons to evade further politicisation—the need to survive and get ahead, which kept refugees busy, suspected instrumentalisation by Ethiopia (people had had enough of political reasoning and its potential risks in an authoritarian environment), and fear of taking a stand beyond conspicuous obedience, where unavoidable. Eritrea’s political education, tying each and everything back to EPLF’s liberation struggle in the most obtrusive and boring repetitive manner, showed an unplanned effect among the country’s youth, who most often did not even remember much of the border war of 1998–2000. Becoming a political activist under Ethiopia’s guidance, however, brought some liberties and privileges, such as travel permits, access to information, government officials, and (apparently) the urban refugee programme. For those so engaged, the risk seemed manageable: was not Ethiopia, after all, reliably Eritrea’s archenemy? The ensuing development was unforeseeable: the Ethiopian TPLF regime, committed to regime change in Eritrea, collapsed first, while the Eritrean president Isaias Afeworki stayed in power. 3.5  The Local Population in Tigray Province With Ethiopia in an uneasy transition, the role and perception of the Tigrayan population also changed. Unlike in the rest of Ethiopia, the TPLF was a popular and fairly democratic movement in Tigray—although criticism against it apparently grew under Hailemariam Dessalegn’s government (2012–2018). Local peasants and people’s militias reliably surveyed movement and activities of refugees outside the camp, during the first restrictive phase of refugee administration, and did so, at times, with open hostility. At the same time, also, locals mingled with the camp population and allegedly even profited from UNHCR’s resettlement programme. During the second phase, voices of jealousy and critique towards refugees and their apparent privileges became louder. In Tigray’s provincial capital, Mekele, however, refugees and locals also got into closer contact, revealing the region’s transnational character and its thick web of joint social and biographic ties. Formerly a quiet and provincial town, Mekele began to flourish, even taking on some of Asmara’s urban flair. This trend intensified after the regime change, when Tigrayans were publicly harassed elsewhere and much of central Ethiopia became unsafe.

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

421

When the borders opened for a couple of weeks in summer 2018, common ties with the Northern neighbours were stressed. Coming closer had a twofold effect: While tensions between Tigrayans and Eritreans over political affiliations and security concerns eased, Eritrean refugees, who were now granted much more freedom of movement and allowed to move to towns and cities, contributed to price increases in the housing market. 3.6  Criminal Networks Finally, criminal networks reached the camps and engaged both staff members and refugees. As a result, ration cards and resettlement numbers appear to have been sold, allowing people to jump the line, and some refugees were willing to act as brokers and intermediaries with criminals. In this way, they hoped to push forward their own onward journeys. The invisible, but certain presence of migration’s informal economy—its inherent promise, fraud, and violence—essentially contributed to a common disorientation over who was really who in the camp and blurred the boundaries of formal institutions and informal roles and means. Smugglers and criminals were ambivalent actors, tricksters switching between good and bad, formal and informal. They might offer both: either exploitation and rip-off, or paid service to move on. Another actor—likewise invisible—was perceived less equivocally. 3.7  The Eritrean Government It was not only the Ethiopian government and ARRA, its respective authority in charge, that the refugees feared. They were also afraid of the Eritrean government on the other side of the border. The phrase ‘shaebia ı ̄du newı ̄ḥ ̕’ ı ̄yu’ was a common saying in the camp. It literally means ‘shaebia – the Eritrean government – has got long hands’ and indicated that Eritrean security forces could effectively reach out into exile and diaspora. In the camp’s relative security, shaebia became an almost mythical figure with a devious, omniscient, and boundless character. Stories of its security forces retaliating on those who betrayed the nation were widely known and shared. Accordingly, shaebia had spies in Ethiopia, Sudan, the camps, in transit, and also in the global North, reporting back to the government. Such perceptions are not new and date back to the liberation struggle, when alleged collaborators of the enemy were warned and killed by guerrilla death squads (De Waal 1991, p.  46, p. 247). Eritrea’s global

422 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

interference and diaspora surveillance—actual or rumoured—has been documented and discussed by several scholars (Bernal 2006; Hepner 2003; Opas and McMurray 2015). Bozzini (2015) sketched how reprisal measures against deserters’ families back home export fear among the diaspora and foster mutual mistrust in exile. Thus, even in the diaspora the readiness to political dissidence remains limited. Bearing such retaliation measures in mind, Mulu Getachew Abebe’s interlocutors cautiously avoided taking government property across the border, such as important documents, money, arms, or even army uniforms. Inside the camp it was not the actual and undoubted presence of Eritrean intelligence that undermined trust and solidarity, but the mere possibility of their presence. In particular, the camp’s proximity to the border made refugees wary of Eritrean security. Individuals identified as loyalists or former government employees made refugees worry about “false refugees” (Bozzini 2015, p. 42; Massa 2016), sent by the government to spy on the milieu of the exiled. This not only created paranoia about Eritrean agents inside the camp but also fostered the vision of a powerful government, whose ambit of state control transcends its sovereign territory. In fact, surveillance may have far-reaching outcomes, and such fears are not groundless, but learned and embodied back home. “In Eritrea,” Wedi Ahmed told Mulu Getachew Abebe in Mai Ayni, “if you get sick, you would not tell your sister. You do not know who your brother is. This experience has come with us. Here [in the refugee camp] you can chat freely. But that chat may bring you something, a problem.” Stories of kidnapped officials from within the regime, who had fled to Khartoum, rumoured throughout the refugee milieu. While an actual rendition was, in most cases, unlikely, fear was omnipresent and existential. From a more distanced point of view it was quite likely that Eritrea had its ‘ears’ in Ethiopia’s camp and, although we are not aware of any concrete cases, it might have had the capacity to send hit squads to target selected escapees. Reconciliation, however, eased Eritrea’s restrictions and allowed to get close to opposition parties in exile and to refugees under ‘international protection’ in camps and cities, particularly after Eritrea reopened its embassy in Addis Ababa. Unsurprisingly, Tigray’s refugee camps—particularly Shimelba and Hitsats in the North—were caught up by hostilities at the end of 2020. Besides the Ethiopian federal military, loyal to Abiy Ahmed, on the one hand, and renegade TPLF troops on the other, local militias, bandits, and also the Eritrean military went to war in Tigray. Atrocities—destruction,

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

423

abduction, looting, and the killing of refugees and civilians—have been reported (Agence France Press 2021).

4   Submission, Evasion, Disorientation One Sunday morning in late 2018, Wedi Ahmed, Aman, Mohamed, Tesfai, Mesfin, Freta, and Mulu Getachew Abebe had coffee at Aman’s place, a small room in Mai Ayni refugee camp. There, they discussed the unfolding reconciliation between the Eritrean and Ethiopian governments and the ongoing, even increasing, flight of Eritreans towards Ethiopian refugee camps. Mulu inquired about a widely remembered demonstration against the Eritrean government that had been held in the camp some time before. Aman answered: “It was last year.” He looked around and asked the others. “Wasn’t it last year that we carried out our demonstration ‘Down, down Isaias’?” Demonstratively he raised his fist and uttered in a derisive tone, “Down! Down!” Referring to a video recording of that event, Mesfin commented regretfully: “If I found it, I would like to do away with that video.” Aman and Wedi Ahmed added that if they had only known, they would have done better to have shouted, “Up! Up!” “Where can you get it?” Aman asked, despairingly. In response, Mesfin laughed: “Asmara! At the government palace in Asmara.” In the conversation that followed, Wedi Ahmed, Tesfai, and Mohamed discussed if such a demonstration could take place again, or if it would now be stopped by an Ethiopian government anxious to not disturb the peace process. Aman seemed increasingly uneasy with the topic and ceased to participate in the debate. Like the others, he absent-mindedly played with his mobile phone. Mohamed had just started to say, “Ethiopia can improve and normalize the relationship between the two countries, but”, when Wedi Ahmed interrupted him and the others abruptly: “First of all, put down your phones!” The others burst out in laughter, and a debate on morale and the right way to manoeuvre between fear and prudence arose. When Mohamed stated, “Wedi Ahmed is afraid of us,” Wedi Ahmed answered: “I am not afraid of a person, but of mobile phones.” Crossing the border and handing oneself over to the Ethiopian state, was clearly an act of submission. Eritrean refugees handled this in a pragmatic way: they had already learned to deal with opaque forces beyond their control. To be punished without much information on the reasons behind one’s punishment has become a very Eritrean version of Jackson’s “being acted upon” (2005, p. 137; cf. Bourdieu 1990). Submission was a

424 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

prudent anticipation of what could happen, an attempt to obliterate any suspicion of opposition and resistance and also, sometimes, a habitual reflex. While our informants were well aware of the relative safety and greater freedom of speech possible in Ethiopia’s refugee camps, they knew all too well that they had first entered enemy-territory and only then had they become recognised as international refugees under the formal protection of the United Nations. In three different periods since the border war Eritrean refugees were exposed to restrictions and confinement in a hostile environment: the first of these began with the end of that war and the ensuing mass migration, while the third started with Abiy Ahmed’s take over as Ethiopian prime minister. Not only did they feel like prisoners of war, they also faced the pressing appeal to assist Ethiopian propaganda against the Eritrean regime. While they did not fully engage with those appeals as those above them had planned, they did not openly resist either. As submission generates its own form of subversion and dissidence, Eritrean refugees in Ethiopian camps sneaked out of the camps, evaded political mobilisation and indoctrination—or, alternatively, pretended to a firm conviction, while being more interested in the few privileges that pretence might gain for themselves and their family members. Precaution, mistrust and bitterness, embodied already in Eritrea, continued in the refugee camp as dispositions for informal praxis. During various stays in the field, many of our informants were reluctant to express their views and experiences regarding the Eritrean government, particularly in the presence of others. Except for citing military conscription or the system as a whole as their reasons to flee, many were cagey about denouncing the regime in Asmara. Even long-standing friends, some of whom Mulu Getachew Abebe was able to meet repeatedly in Mai Ayni or Hitsats, kept silent when she raised questions related to Eritrean opposition parties or Ethiopian-Eritrean relations. Tesfai, in response to her enquiries, once made a clear-cut, explicit statement: “Mulu, I came here because I hate politics; politics is none of my business”. Submission and evasion, however, need some minimal knowledge of social order and hierarchies, even if that knowledge is informal and based on little more than rumour. With the resignation of Meles Zenawi’s successor, Haile Mariam Dessalegn, and the unexpected emergence of Abiy Ahmed’s policy of reconciliation, long-standing conflicts that had previously been silenced and suppressed were able to once again erupt. Refugees from Eritrea were no longer either a bargaining chip or a political instrument, but had become a diplomatic leftover and a disturbing factor in an

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

425

international peace process that had won the attention of the United States, the European Union, and the Nobel Prize committee in Oslo. As before, refugees were at the bottom of the social ladder, and their hopes of being seen and cared for were disappointed. Furthermore, in times of turmoil and transition, it became even less clear who actually called the tune—and when. Here, not only did political levels and spheres or geographical regions and international regimes interfere with each other in complex and asymmetrical ways (Scheele 2019, p. 146), but so too did different political eras, linked through social media and their capacity to store and remember information throughout time and space. For Wedi Ahmed and his friends the precarious, but somehow reliable—and to some extent readable—setting of the refugee camp had become, what Henrik Vigh called a “shifting ground” (2009, p. 422), rendering social navigation a helpless undertaking. Tsega’s errantry after she left Eritrea running, without having, yet, arrived anywhere, became a metaphor for the camp’s life-world in general: “because I don’t know”.

5   Trustworthy Authorities in Corrupted Human Life-Worlds To investigate authority and power beyond the narrow confines of Eritrea, to pragmatically submit, where needed, and to evade, where possible, have become common traits of refugees in the camps of northern Ethiopia. One had to learn to get along, to know who was really who, and where to go to get what, to know whom to avoid and from whom to learn, if not to trust. In a way, this was easier as long as ARRA was representing an authoritarian post-guerrilla government that shared some traits with its Eritrean counterpart. That organisation could not be trusted, but neither could it be openly opposed, as refugees had to rely on it in the course of everyday life in the camp. That dependency only grew after refugees comprehended that neither the UNHCR nor one of the different international NGOs had much say inside the camps. The world could only be accessed by grace of Ethiopia unless one were to take the fully informal way through the smuggling routes of Sudan and Libya. With Abiy Ahmed’s political U-turn, ARRA’s agenda, though changing through time, was no longer safe. In addition, it had to be suspected that even inside ARRA chains of command and loyalty were being reassembled—and that Eritrean security was gaining much easier access to Ethiopian camps and cities. Opposition activists, intermediaries approved from above (Inhetveen 2010, pp. 165–80; cf. Krämer 2019), were suddenly

426 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

exposed—and so were those who had willingly participated in a manipulated demonstration against the Eritrean regime or simply had let themselves go, shouting out what they could no longer conceal: Down! Down, Isaias! Refugees from Eritrea were used to dictatorial rule and inside the country they were neither able to distance themselves from the dictatorship’s leaders and perpetrators, nor from their own entanglement in dictatorial state and society—remnants of the EPLF’s liberation struggle. Eritrea’s national myth—‘we against the world’—provided unquestionable legitimacy to the country’s government, although, it obliterated political diversity and discord (Gilkes 1991). Autonomy was a fundamental political ideal of the EPLF’s struggle, but in the guerrilla’s Maoist self-conception, autonomy was reserved for the national collective; individual or social group interests could not be considered or even had to be eradicated on behalf of the common good (Bernstein and Coleman 2009, pp.  9–14). Isaias Afeworki and his clique certainly damaged this narrative; still, his rule had to be acknowledged without alternative. Traits of guerrilla culture—particularly the pragmatic, though an ambivalent necessity of submission to the dominant power—continued to prevail. Once in Ethiopia—at least before the peace deal—the Ethiopian government could soon be identified as quite similar to the government one had known before. After all, both had originated from the same guerrilla war. As the ‘Eritrean’ camps were located in Tigray, home of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, Ethiopia’s state institutions then could rely on uncontested political strength and broad public support. For Eritrean refugees it seemed easy to accept the Ethiopian government’s uncontested authority and legitimacy, even though Ethiopia was Eritrea’s archenemy. Just like ‘back home’, reservation and mistrust were typical reactions towards the new environment of the camp, a familiar disciplinary institution. Where the situation seemed promising hopes and claims were expressed, evasion was practised, where possible, and submission was engaged in, where necessary. However, the camp offered more, a confusing arrangement of yet unknown and diverse formal and informal actors and authorities, whose potential had first to be evaluated and learned. Furthermore, and in accordance with regional and global political developments, camp life changed considerably during the three phases we have shortly sketched here. The shaking of the camp’s political fundamentals further confused power relations that had previously been more or less clear, as much as they did refugee’s own dependent positions (cf. Vigh 2009). Life inside Eritrea had not left them well prepared to deal with a multitude of actors, all claiming

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

427

different forms of power at the same time; it had, rather, taught them to fear an unquestionable hierarchy and its rule of the stick. However, it proved existentially necessary to identify those who call the tune, a mere necessity to get along and ideally to move on. Pragmatic reorientation was needed, a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1998, p. 80), the rules of which one could only guess. In such a constellation, legitimacy was reduced to a violent potential (cf. Arendt 1961), while the necessary conditions for autonomy—understood as “power for reflection, for self-determination, and for not going along” (Adorno 1997, pp. 13–14)—were simply not given (Treiber 2017, pp.  166–175). Self-deprecation and the lasting destruction of the social become an inherently moral problem of Eritrea’s exodus. Disorientation and half-knowledge only confirm unprivileged migration’s first principle: in order to reach a better life elsewhere, you will have to help yourself. In recent debate, sociality has got back into anthropology’s focus, considering the entanglement of individual fate and becoming, conditioned and conditioning life-worlds, and their global interconnections (Ingold 2018, pp.  79–105; Jackson 2017; Scheele 2019). While an overwhelming disorientation prevailed in the camp, the question of what forms of sociality and political consciousness that are, in the longer run, bred and transmitted under such circumstances remains an open one. While Wedi Ahmed and his coffee party had to helplessly shrug their shoulders, Tsega—at least for the moment—found an orientation again. She was lucky to hear a soldier speaking Amharic, which was unthinkable inside Eritrea and would have contradicted everything she knew and experienced there, thus an unequivocal sign. But even in a social environment of mistrust, fraud, and violence she pragmatically relied on perceived fundamentals of humanity, tying together Eritreans and Ethiopians (and from her perspective maybe even humankind as such): the quasi-natural and therefore uncorrupted and morally pure relations to God and to one’s own mother. She demanded of the Tigrayan shepherd boy that he swear by his mother: in response, “[h]e drew a cross and swore”. With only mother and God remaining trustworthy authorities, what does human-made sociality then look like?

References Abebe, Mulu Getachew (2019). Moving in the Face of Uncertainty: Eritrean Refugees en route, Flight Experiences across the Ethio–Eritrean Border. In: Manger, Leif / Fekadu, Adugna / Assal, Munzoul / Onyango, Eria Olowo

428 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

(Eds.), Borderland Dynamics in East Africa: Cases from Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda. Addis Ababa: OSSREA, pp. 83–99. Adorno, Theodor W. (1997). Erziehung nach Auschwitz. (First published in 1966) In: Schreier, Helmut / Heyl, Matthias (Eds.), Never again! The Holocaust’s Challenge for Educators. Hamburg: Reinhold Krämer, pp. 11–20. Agence France Press, AFP (2021). Eritrean Refugees Caught in Crossfire of Ethiopia’s Tigray War. February 03. Retrieved from https://www.voanews. com/ethiopia-­tigray/eritrean-­refugees-­caught-­crossfire-­ethiopias-­tigray-­war. Agier, Michel (2011). Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Cambridge: Polity. Arendt, Hannah (1961). What is Authority? (First published in 1954) In: Arendt, Hannah (Ed.), Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. New York, NY: Viking Press, pp. 91–142. Bernal, Victoria (2006). Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online. In: Global Networks, 6 (2), pp. 161–179. Bernstein, Steven / Coleman, William D. (2009). Introduction: Autonomy, Legitimacy, and Power in an Era of Globalization. In: Bernstein, Steven / Coleman, William D. (Eds.), Unsettled Legitimacy: Political Community, Power, and Authority in a Global Era. Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 1–29. Betts, Alexander / Fryszer, Leon / Omata, Naohiko / Sterck, Oliver (2019). Refugee Economies in Addis Ababa: Towards Sustainable Opportunities for Urban Communities? Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre. Retrieved from https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications/refugee-economies-in-addis-ababatowards-sustainable-opportunities-for-urban-communities. Bourdieu, Pierre (1998). Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990). The Logic of Practice. (First published in 1980) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bozzini, David (2015). The Fines and the Spies: Fears of State Surveillance in Eritrea and in the Diaspora. In: Social Analysis, 59 (4), pp. 32–49. Bulcha, Mekuria (1988). Flight an Integration: Causes of Mass Exodus from Ethiopia and Problems of Integration in the Sudan. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. Clapham, Christopher (2017). The Horn of Africa: State Formation and Decay. London: Hurst. De Waal, Alex (1991). Evil Days: 30 Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia. An Africa Watch Report, Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from https://www.hrw. org/sites/default/files/reports/Ethiopia919.pdf. Foucault, Michel (1982). The Subject and Power. In: Critical Inquiry, 8 (4), pp. 777–795. Foucault, Michel (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (First published in 1975) New York, NY: Vintage.

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

429

Gilkes, Patrick (1991). Eritrea: Historiography and Mythology. In: African Affairs, 90 (361), pp. 623–628. Harmon-Gross, Elizabeth C. (2009). Seeking Resettlement and Navigating Transnational Politics: The Intersection of Policies, Human Rights and Individuals in Shimelba Refugee Camp. MA thesis, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee. Retrieved from https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/84/. Harrell-Bond, Barbara E. / Voutira, Eftihia (1992). Anthropology and the Study of Refugees. In: Anthropology Today, 8, pp. 6–11. Hepner, Tricia R. (2003). Religion, Nationalism, and Transnational Civil Society in the Eritrean Diaspora. In: Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power, 10, pp. 269–293. Hirt, Nicole / Mohammad, Abdulkader Saleh (2013). ‘Dreams Don’t Come True in Eritrea’: Anomie and Family Disintegration due to the Structural Militarisation of Society. In: Journal of Modern African Studies, 51 (1), pp. 139–168. Horden, Peregrine (2012). Situations Both Alike? Connectivity, the Mediterranean, the Sahara. In: McDougal, James / Scheele, Judith (Eds.), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 25–38. Ingold, Tim (2018). Anthropology: Why It Matters. Medford: Polity Press. Inhetveen, Katharina (2010). Die politische Ordnung des Flüchtlingslagers: Akteure  – Macht  – Organisation. Eine Ethnographie im Südlichen Afrika. Bielefeld: Transcript. Jackson, Michael (2017). How Lifeworlds Work: Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Michael (2005). Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York, NY: Berghahn. Kibreab, Gaim (2017). The Eritrean National Service: Servitude for ‘The Common Good’ and the Youth Exodus. Woodbridge: James Currey. Krämer, Mario (2019). The Current Debate on Neotraditional Authority in South Africa: Notes on the Legitimacy and Rise of Intermediaries. In: Hüsken, Thomas / Solyga, Alexander / Badi, Dida (Eds.), The Multiplicity of Orders and Practices: A Tribute to Georg Klute. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, pp. 111–133. Malkki, Liisa H. (1995). Purity and Exile. Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mao Tse-Tung (1967). The Role of The Chinese Communist Party in the National War. (First published in 1938) In: People’s Publishing House (Ed.), Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Volume II. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, pp. 195–211.

430 

M. TREIBER AND M. G. ABEBE

Massa, Aurora (2016). Learning Not to Ask: Some Methodological Implications of Studying Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia. In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 141 (2), pp. 257–280. Mitscherlich, Alexander / Mitscherlich, Margarete (2009). Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. (First published in 1967) München: Piper. Negash, Tekeste / Tronvoll, Kjetil (2000). Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War. Oxford: James Currey. O’Kane, David / Hepner, Tricia Redeker (Eds.) (2011). Biopolitics, Militarism, and the Developmental State: Eritrea in the 21st Century. New York, NY: Berghahn. Opas, Matthew / McMurray, David (2015). Under the Gaze of the State: ICT Use and State Surveillance of Eritrean Refugees in Italy. In: Refugee Survey Quarterly, 34, pp. 105–125. Plaut, Martin (2016). Understanding Eritrea: Inside Africa’s Most Repressive State. London: Hurst. Pool, David (2001). From Guerrillas to Government: The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. Oxford: James Currey. Riggan, Jennifer (2016). The Struggling State: Nationalism, Mass Militarization, and the Education of Eritrea. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Riggan, Jennifer / Poole, Amanda (2019a). The Global and Local Politics of Refugee Management in the Horn: Ethiopian Refugee Policy and Eritrean Refugee Agency. In: Schmidt, Johannes Dragsbaek / Kimathi, Leah / Owiso, Michael Omondi (Eds.), Refugees and Forced Migration in the Horn and Eastern Africa: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities. Cham: Springer, pp. 155–174. Riggan, Jennifer / Poole, Amanda (2019b). Higher Education, Hospitality and Onward Movement. Eritrean University Students and Ethiopian Refugee Policy. In: Arar, Khalid / Haj-Yehia, Kussai / Ross, David / Kondakci, Yasar (Eds.), Higher Education Challenges for Migrant and Refugee Students in a Global World. New York, NY: Peter Lang, pp. 311–326. Samuel Hall Consulting (2014). Living Out of Camp: Alternatives to Camp-Based Assistance for Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia. Commissioned by the Norwegian Refugee Council. Retrieved from https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/ files/resources/Living-­Out-­of-­Camp-­Alternative-­to-­Camp-­based-­Assistance-­ in-­Ethiopia.pdf. Scheele, Judith (2019). Heterarchy, Locality, Connectivity, Tribes: Can (and should) We Speak of a Shared Political Culture across the Sahara? In: Hüsken, Thomas / Solyga, Alexander / Badi, Dida (Eds.), The Multiplicity of Orders and Practices: A Tribute to Georg Klute. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, pp. 135–153. Tesfaye, Lea (2011). Stationen mobiler Fluchtgeschichten: Migration als Verhandlungsfeld zwischen Kontrollregimen, Handlungsräumen und der

  WHO CALLS THE TUNE? 

431

Verwirklichung persönlicher Lebensvorstellungen am Beispiel eritreischer Flüchtlinge in Äthiopien. Unpublished MA thesis. München: Munich University. Tesfaye, Mitiku Gabrehiwot / Gebrehiwot, Mahlet Alemu (2020). A ‘Party’ at the Border: An Anthropological Take on the Ethio-Eritrean Peace Deal of 2018. In: Cogent Arts & Humanities, 7 (1). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.108 0/23311983.2020.1727159. Theweleit, Klaus (1980). Männerphantasien. Vol. 2. Männerkörper – Zur Psychoanalyse des weißen Terrors. (First published in 1978) Reinbek: Rowohlt. Treiber, Magnus (2018). From Revolutionary Education to Futures Elsewhere: Children and Young Refugees Fleeing from Eritrea. In: Bhabha, Jacqueline / Kanics, Jyothi / Senovilla Hernández, Daniel (Eds.), Research Handbook on Child Migration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 49–65. Treiber, Magnus (2017). Migration aus Eritrea: Wege, Stationen, informelles Handeln. Berlin: Reimer. Treiber, Magnus (2016). Informality and Informalization among Eritrean Refugees: Why Migration Does Not Provide a Lesson in Democracy. In: Quehl, Hartmut / Cante, Fredy (Eds.), Transitional Justice and Peace Building in Turbulent Regions. Handbook of Research. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 157–179. Treiber, Magnus / Tesfaye, Lea (2008). Step by Step: Migration from Eritrea. In: Bruchhaus, Eva-Maria / Sommer, Monika (Eds.), Hot Spot Horn of Africa Revisited: Approaches to Make Sense of Conflict. Berlin: Lit, pp. 280–295. Tsega (2016). Personal interview by Mulu Getachew Abebe, Hitsats Refugee Camp, October. Vigh, Henrik. (2009). Motion Squared: A Second Look at the Concept of Social Navigation. In: Anthropological Theory, 9, pp. 419–438. Whyte, Susan Reynolds (2009). Epilogue. In: Haram, Liv / Yamba, C.  Bawa (Eds.), Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, pp. 213–16.

Index1

A Abbink, Jon, 121–123, 124n4, 125, 128, 130n10, 133, 134, 134n14, 136–138, 137n15, 141–143, 152, 152n10, 349, 350, 358, 362 Abraham (religious figure), 101 Accountability, 14, 16, 131, 140, 143, 237, 284 Acephalous, 77, 123, 269 Activist, 52, 164, 167, 220, 231, 329, 395, 420, 425 Actor ambivalent, 414–423 formal and informal, 408, 419, 426 state, 122, 370 Administration colonial, 12, 70, 80, 223, 225, 227, 268, 348, 353 public, 153 state, 125, 140, 174, 229, 415–417 Admiration, 67, 224, 418 Adorno, Theodor W., 408, 412, 427

Adversary, 149, 150, 172 Afeworki, Isaias (politician), 409–411, 420, 426 Affinity, 69 Africa central, 64–66, 74, 79 Eastern, 12, 14, 19, 66, 349, 350, 358 equatorial, 63, 65–68, 78 Northeast, 150 Southern, 12, 19, 130, 188, 220, 232, 245, 253, 261, 267, 268, 305, 383 Afrikaners (ethnic group), 18, 381, 383–386, 387n12, 392, 396, 399, 400 Afrikaners (ethnic group), 376, 376n3, 381 Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) (political party), 36 Age -grades, 133, 134 -sets, 133, 368

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Steinforth, S. Klocke-Daffa (eds.), Challenging Authorities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76924-6

433

434 

INDEX

Agency, 131, 149, 153, 157, 171n38, 246, 258, 258n9, 350, 407, 408, 414, 416 humanitarian, 351 Agriculture, 53, 128, 248, 249, 253, 254, 257, 259, 262 Agro-Pastoralist, see Pastoralist Ahmed, Abiy (politician), 152, 172, 406, 417, 419, 422, 424, 425 Aid, 186, 328, 360, 366, 369 international, 151, 152n9 AIDS, 103 Alienation, 16, 171, 285, 359 All People’s Party (political party), 203 Allegiance, 15, 162, 175, 195, 199–207, 211 Allocation, 6, 7, 16, 33, 104, 275, 277–280, 284, 350, 369 Almagor (ethnic group), 130n10 Altar, 70 Alterity, 63, 64, 66, 67 Ambassador, 78 Ambiguity, 10, 109, 211, 227, 399 moral, 14 Ambition, 99, 100, 132, 210, 321 Ambivalence, 128, 350 Amhara (ethnic group), 150n4, 156, 157 Amharic (language), 122n2, 131n11, 132, 156, 168n33, 413, 427 Ammunition, 348, 357–359, 361–365, 367–370 Anachronism, 130 Anarchy, regulated, 135 Ancestor, 7, 13, 33, 44, 48, 50, 51, 66, 69, 72, 80, 125, 140, 202, 296, 299, 304–306 royal, 72 Angel, 101, 107 Angola, 13, 16, 79–82, 188, 248, 249, 256, 257, 278, 405

Animal, 135, 138, 142, 164, 225, 279, 300, 359, 360, 365 Anointment, 160n22 Antagonism, 149, 200 Apartheid, 18, 190, 227, 256, 377, 378n4, 379–381, 384, 384n9, 387n12 Arabic (language), 32, 33, 43, 409 Arabs (ethnic group), 13, 29–55 Arbore (ethnic group), 134, 136 Architecture, 325 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 219, 221, 223, 238, 408, 411, 427 Army, 348, 353, 422 Arnold, Glony, 275–278, 282 Askaris, 348, 353 Assassination, 93, 381, 386, 387 Assembly decision-making, 155 general, 174 traditional, 157 Association, 37, 55, 65, 77, 79, 81, 106, 170n35, 173n42, 174, 250, 256, 298, 321, 329, 330, 334, 335n7, 337, 342, 415 initiatory, 72 Australia, 169, 416 Autarchy, moral, 397 Authoritarianism, 127, 408 Authority alternative, 14, 17, 20–22, 187, 211, 349, 356, 359, 370, 398, 399 charismatic, 104, 105n17, 105n18, 106, 107 consensual, 133 contested, 13–15, 17, 185–212 customary, 67, 73, 76 festival-based, 76 governmental, 156 illegitimate, 222 informal, 18, 407

 INDEX 

judicial, 133 legal, 106, 313, 327 mediated, 19, 378, 379, 396, 400 moral, 11, 15, 196, 206, 208, 210, 223, 379 negative, 140, 142 neo-traditional, 3, 21, 219–240 plural, 17, 320 political, 5, 15, 18, 104n16, 122, 133, 136, 150, 188n3, 219, 305, 342, 408 public, 123, 322, 326, 332 religious, 108 secular, 111 sociopolitical, 10 spiritual, 305, 307 state, 13, 15, 17, 19, 321, 323, 334n7, 342, 343, 351, 352, 365, 371 traditional (TA), 6, 9, 14–17, 79, 88n2, 94, 95, 97, 106, 129, 147–176, 187, 188, 188n3, 190, 191, 199, 205, 220, 225, 233, 263, 267–286, 305, 313, 322, 343 Authority for Refugees and Returnees Affairs (ARRA), 415–419, 421, 425 Autochthony, 80 Autonomy, 74, 79, 123n3, 141, 203n20, 227, 247, 426, 427 Awe, 13, 66, 67, 200 B Bachelor, 170n35 Balance, 29, 133, 207, 222, 262, 269, 377, 388–397 Banda, Hastings Kamuzu (politician), 88n5, 89, 89n6, 90–91n7, 91 Banda, Joyce (politician), 92n9, 94, 94n11

435

Bandit, 17, 319, 320, 326, 327, 331, 335, 336, 338, 349, 350, 368, 422 Banditry, 321, 324, 325, 327n3, 357, 362, 370 Bantu (language group), 66, 384, 386n10 Barrett, Stanley, 8, 110 Beer, 69, 70, 138 Belgium, 79 Belief, 9, 46, 73, 134n14, 139, 140, 273, 312, 320, 322, 323, 328, 337, 339, 380, 387, 387n12, 394 Belonging, 30, 35, 47, 51, 76, 80, 122, 155n18, 168, 232, 233n10, 247, 250, 280, 359, 360, 364, 367 ethnic, 78, 150n4 Benefit, 98, 108, 110, 113, 191, 192, 197n11, 198, 203, 206–208, 210, 231, 247, 262, 277, 279, 352, 365, 370, 397 economic, 15 Betrayal, 394 Bible, 95, 101, 102, 339, 387n12 Big men, 230 Binary, 3, 105, 107, 109, 110, 129, 296 Bird, 138 Birth, 137, 391 Bishop, 15, 49, 192, 196, 198, 198n14, 199, 205–207, 210, 211 Blessing, 95, 135, 138, 139, 164n27, 198, 278, 338 Blood, 14, 73, 97, 135, 137, 251, 273 Body, 36, 90n7, 99, 128, 132, 187, 258, 303, 338, 339, 376 politic, 141 Border, 14, 16, 29–31, 54, 64, 75, 78, 80–82, 122, 155, 156, 248–250, 272, 273, 350, 352, 358, 405–408, 410, 412, 413, 416, 420–424

436 

INDEX

Botswana, 186, 246, 254, 268, 272, 274 Boundary, 100, 125, 225, 247, 250, 252, 255, 262, 271, 275, 300, 301, 304, 309, 358, 421 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 21, 104, 150, 377–380, 382, 394, 399, 400, 408, 423, 427 Bribe, 327 Bride price, 138n17 British Commonwealth of Nations, 375 British South Africa Company, 297, 297n2, 308 Broederbond, 18, 376, 376n3, 377, 382, 382n7, 384, 385, 388, 388n13, 389n16, 395, 397, 400 Broker, 419, 421 Bureaucracy, 381, 400 Bureaucrat, 381, 415 Bureaucratisation, 157 Burma, 125n6 Butter, 164 C Cameroon, 66 Camp, 18, 252, 405–409, 413–427 Capital cultural and social, 8 political, 64 sorts of, 378 symbolic, 150, 377, 379, 396 Capitalism, 48, 307, 313 Caravan, 41, 46 Cattle raids, 17, 348, 357, 358, 363, 364, 370 rustling, 17, 324, 325, 327n3 Cave, 299–301, 307, 308 Celebration, 128, 171, 173 Centralism, 415 democratic, 151

Centralization, 65, 74 Centre economic, 415 urban, 159 Ceremony, 17, 69, 70, 73, 76, 78–80, 82, 98, 99, 136, 139, 157, 167, 168, 171, 204, 276, 294, 299, 300, 302, 306, 312 Chakuamba, Gwanda (politician), 90 Change, 31, 43, 63, 67, 92n9, 93, 95n12, 109n20, 110, 122, 134, 137n15, 143, 147, 155, 157, 170, 172, 174, 191, 206, 210–212, 226, 234, 245–264, 296, 303, 342, 377, 381, 384, 392, 396, 399n24, 406, 415, 420 Charisma anti-, 106, 109 negative, 105–107 Charms, 74, 91, 101, 102, 338–340 Chewa (ethnic group), 88n5, 90n7 Chief apolitical, 75 customary, 75 elusive, 121, 143 leopard-skin, 136 paramount, 78, 81, 95n12, 269, 354, 355 sacred, 137n15 sub, 81 Chiefdom, 13, 64, 67–80, 82 Chieftaincy administrative, 227 colonial, 64, 75–76 Chieftainship, 72, 78, 269, 273, 301 Childhood, 392n19, 407 Children, 45, 69, 139n17, 191–193, 197n10, 198, 209, 269, 300, 307, 332–341, 368, 377 Chilembwe, John, 87n1 China, 127, 152n9, 299 Chokwe (ethnic group), 13, 63–82

 INDEX 

Christianity born-again, 102 Catholic, 10, 90, 335, 339 orthodox, 155 Pentecostal, 102, 107 Christianization, 65, 253 Chwezi (ethnic group), 67, 69–71, 73 Circumcision, 76, 80, 82, 155, 353n4 Citizenship, 33, 37, 55, 350, 371 Civil society, see Society Clan dynastic, 67, 69, 71, 72 patri-, 71 Class generation, 160, 160n22 membership, 155n18 middle, 226 Classification, 6, 10, 104, 247, 358, 376n2, 378 Clay, 78, 299, 308 Cleansing, 136 Clientelism, 223 Coalition, 90, 152, 173, 190, 203, 209 Coercion, 132–134, 222 Cohesion, 65, 337 Cohesiveness, 263 Collaboration, 65, 227, 232, 412, 416 Colonialism British, 88n1, 150, 375 internal, 125, 125n7 neo, 9 post-, 3, 10, 12, 17, 22, 29–31, 39, 51–54, 63, 65, 66n1, 70, 87, 111, 140, 148, 175, 188, 223, 294, 295, 298, 305, 307, 310, 313, 323–325, 379 Coloniality, 296, 311, 313 Colonisation, 49, 64, 65, 78, 297, 304, 325 Colony, 29, 297, 309, 325, 383, 409 Colour, 110, 172, 172n41 Commands, 111, 123, 131, 143, 222, 396, 410, 425

437

Community imagined, 6 marginalised, 269 Comoros, 35 Competition, 2, 22, 73, 77, 148, 153, 169, 173, 260, 343 Compliance, 133, 143, 187 Computer, 157 Concession, 228–231, 235, 239, 308, 385 Conduct, 125, 131, 135, 140, 141, 203, 226, 300, 302, 303, 364, 376n3 Conflict interethnic, 348, 350 resolution, 136, 153 Confrontation, 162, 206, 326 Congo, 42, 65, 80, 376 Connectivity, 409 Consciousness collective, 166 ethnic, 174 political, 19 social, 52 Conscription, 410, 424 Consensus, 7, 65, 67, 93, 110, 134, 239, 269, 273 Consent, 10, 139, 143, 186, 222, 238, 312 Conservancy, 16, 267–286 Conservation, 270 Conspiracy, 2 Constitution, 76, 92, 152, 270, 301, 303 Continuity and discontinuity, 6 Control, 2, 17, 20, 76, 82, 127, 131, 156, 170, 174, 187, 201, 225, 226, 229, 232, 239, 250, 256, 259, 323, 325, 350, 388, 397, 399, 407, 409, 414, 415, 418, 422, 423 political, 123, 279, 407 Convention, 261, 331, 342 village, 329–331

438 

INDEX

Cooperation, 3, 132, 133, 253, 324, 325, 397, 410 Corruption, 9, 89, 96, 191, 210, 233, 237, 277, 298, 322, 327–331, 407, 410 Cosmology, 5, 70, 87–113, 274, 304 Council Presidential, 200 refugee (see Refugee) Revolutionary, 36 traditional, 228 Councillor senior, 233, 235, 236 traditional, 229, 231, 275, 278 Coup D’État, 36, 411 Court High, 276, 279, 281, 302 Magistrate’s, 97 royal, 67, 77 village, 97, 98 Courtier, 68, 69, 81, 82 Credibility, 171, 411 Crime, 348, 352, 362, 390 Crisis, 2, 93, 226, 261, 405, 410 socioeconomic, 226 Crop, 69, 93, 248, 252, 254 Cult dynastic, 72 medicinal, 72 spirit, 67, 69, 70 Cultivation, 69, 82, 136 Culture, 30, 32, 34, 44, 45, 48, 51–54, 65, 82, 124, 129, 131, 147, 152–154, 157, 168, 187, 188, 230, 237, 261, 311n5, 312, 325–327, 356, 358, 378, 379, 381, 394, 412, 426 Curse, 139 Custodian, 134n14, 163n26, 294, 299–302, 308–311, 308n3, 313 Custom, 36, 75, 188, 254, 268, 311n5, 312, 338

D Daasanach (ethnic group), 351 Dam, 128 Damara (ethnic group), 185, 194, 269 Dance, 73, 79 Danger, 93n10, 98, 171, 202, 327, 330, 399 De Heusch, Luc, 66, 67 De Klerk, Johannes (politician), 387 Death, 34, 71–74, 78, 88n1, 93, 96, 152, 196, 230, 275, 277, 282, 359, 384, 389n16, 392, 421 squad, 421 Debate, 10, 21, 52, 88n5, 92, 105, 110, 123n3, 133, 136, 186, 195, 203, 205, 220, 221, 230, 232, 235, 236, 239, 240, 246, 268, 386n11, 409–412, 414, 423, 427 Decision-Making, 4, 9, 13, 21, 123n3, 150, 155, 174, 189, 211, 234, 239, 276, 282, 284, 285, 419 Delegitimization, 82, 231, 233, 397 Deliberation, 239 Democracy African, 166, 173–176 indigenous, 15, 148, 166, 175 liberal, 152 multi-party, 152 quest for, 233 revolutionary, 152 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, political party), 90, 93n10, 94 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 13, 35, 63, 64, 75–76 Democratization, 6, 9, 423 Demonstrations, 170, 423, 426 Denigration, 130 Dependence, 152n9, 226, 250, 395, 414 Deportation, 37 Deprivation, 132 Deregulation, 9

 INDEX 

Descent, 13, 32, 55, 69, 81 Despot, 227 rural, 227 Despotism, 227, 411 Destiny, 328 Development industrial, 127 Devolution, 131 Dialogue, 133, 163n26, 385, 397, 417 Diaspora, 79, 81, 82, 151, 169, 172, 412, 421, 422 Dichotomy, 3, 6, 14, 188 Dictatorship, 87, 93, 166, 426 Dignity, 66, 192, 312 Discontent, 162, 230 Discourse, 1, 5, 7, 9, 12–14, 21, 49, 64, 66, 78–80, 88n5, 89, 93, 94, 106, 107, 109, 110, 147–151, 150n4, 160n23, 166, 175, 220, 294n1, 296, 320, 323, 324, 377, 380, 389n15, 394, 396–399 Discrimination, 40, 127, 294n1, 311n5, 384 Disease, 135, 138, 390, 393 Disenfranchisement, 128, 202n19 Disobedience, 389, 394 Disorder, 225, 323, 325, 330, 331, 343 Disorientation, 421, 423–425, 427 Displacement, 227 Dissent, 169–171, 175, 239, 398, 399 Dissident, 166, 169, 298, 410 Distribution, 6, 46, 191, 230, 231, 240, 252, 259, 323, 333, 363, 366n13 District Commissioner (DC), 98 Distrust, 15, 16 Diversity, 65, 175, 246, 320, 329, 342, 426 Divination, 67 Division, 16, 39, 51, 75, 133, 230, 232, 257, 285, 359

439

Dizi (ethnic group), 137n15 Dominance, 34, 150n4, 323, 365 Domination, 47, 104n16, 110, 149, 150, 157, 190, 227, 386 legitimate (see Authority) Donor, 89, 196, 206, 396 international, 93, 165, 211 Drought, 93, 251, 305, 306, 355 Drum, 68, 69, 73, 78 Duty, 98, 99, 107, 121–144, 168, 202n19, 347, 353, 356, 357, 395 ritual, 164n27 Dynasty, 9, 34, 67, 70, 71, 74, 75, 325 E Economy informal, 415, 421 plantation, 35 shadow, 351, 371 Education, 9, 36, 44, 45, 47, 51, 88n5, 142, 143, 167, 221, 358, 406, 419, 420 Efficacy, 69 Egalitarianism, 137n15 Elder, 9, 13, 66, 67, 82, 131, 131n12, 133, 134, 137–141, 138n16, 143, 148n2, 154, 157, 160, 162, 163, 168, 169, 198–207, 210, 211, 307, 353, 368 Election, 1, 36, 71, 88–92, 94n11, 149, 153, 167, 170n34, 173, 197, 210, 238, 270, 274, 275, 283, 326, 327n3, 384, 386, 387 Elite, 35, 36, 88, 143, 191, 200, 223, 299, 313, 322–324, 342, 358, 376n3 financial, 9 Embodiment, 105, 142, 174, 359 Emperor, 125, 155, 156, 409 Empire, 29, 49, 125, 155, 226, 375n1

440 

INDEX

Empowerment, 70, 175, 294n1, 323, 414 Enemy, 29, 42, 98, 421 Entanglement, 20, 141, 295–297, 336, 385, 426, 427 Entertainment, 78 Enthronement, 69, 70, 74 Entrepreneur, 102, 127, 228, 358 Epidemic, 251 Epistemology, 11, 111 Equality, 133, 149, 192, 204n22, 239, 312 Eritrea, 152, 406–418, 420–422, 424–427 Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), 411 Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), 409–411, 420, 426 Escalation, 171 Ethiopia, 14, 19, 121–144, 148, 150–154, 151n8, 152n9, 153n11, 153n12, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 165, 169, 172, 173, 175, 350, 351n3, 358, 405–426 Ethiopian Orthodox Church Development and Inter Church Aid Commission (DICAC), 419 Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, political party), 127, 415 Ethnic groups, 6, 18, 80, 95n12, 150, 153, 153n11, 245n1, 247, 248, 263, 348, 348n2, 353, 362, 364 Ethnicity cosmopolitan, 76 inclusive, 68, 76–82 Eurocentrism, 5, 10, 111 Europe, 30, 46–48, 166, 169, 322 Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN), 192, 257, 258, 258n9 Evangelical Lutheran Ovambo/Kavango Church (ELOC), 253, 257

Evangelist, 93 Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., 9, 136 Evasion, 405–427 Evolutionism neo-, 5 social, 5, 111 Exceptionalism, 6 western, 6 Exchange, 108, 108n19, 134, 194, 200, 252, 276, 279, 359–361, 381 Excludability, 247, 248, 248n2, 261–263 Exile, 166, 169, 201, 257, 260, 421, 422 Exodus, 410, 427 Exorcism, 103 Expansion, 4, 21, 105, 110, 129, 150, 150n4, 280 Experience, 2, 11, 15, 18, 31, 43, 66, 168, 169, 198, 279, 321, 332, 335, 340, 350, 352, 391, 400, 405, 412, 422, 424 Expert occult, 92 ritual, 89, 99, 108, 108n19 Expertise, 4, 21, 76, 89, 186n2, 196, 208, 210 Exploitation, 55, 350, 380, 381, 421 Explorer, 130 F Fact, 220, 239, 277, 282, 305, 309, 319, 328, 330, 339, 341, 380, 381, 391, 394, 406, 415, 422 alternative, 1, 11 Factionalism, 134, 226, 230, 411 Falsification, 5, 52 Fame, 66, 91, 191 Family, 33, 36, 43–47, 50, 51, 66, 74, 76, 77, 79, 92, 95, 97, 98, 102,

 INDEX 

106, 138, 155, 155n18, 169, 192, 193, 197, 247, 249, 249n5, 251, 252, 257, 274, 300, 302, 310, 320, 324, 357, 383, 390, 407, 416, 422, 424 Farmer, 66, 73, 79, 98, 100, 165, 248, 298, 300–302, 385, 387 Farming, 164, 165, 225, 226, 248, 249, 261, 302, 418 cooperative, 254, 255 Fascism, 409 Favouritism, 233, 237 Fear, 17, 97, 204, 420, 422, 423, 427 Feast, 66, 168, 169 retirement, 155, 168 Federalism, 127, 419 Fertility, 64, 67, 68, 72, 73, 81, 248 Festival, 13, 73, 78, 80, 81, 157 Festivity, 157, 172 Fighter, 170, 298, 411, 416 Film, 18, 274, 390–392, 390n17, 392n19, 395, 395n23, 396, 398, 399 Finance, 91, 169, 204 Firearms, 226, 336, 338, 356, 357, 362–364, 366, 368, 369 illegal, 358, 363 Firepower, 365, 366, 370 communal, 366 Fish, 138 Flag, 92n9, 128, 172, 172n41, 173 Flexibility, 16 Fluidity, 6, 80, 110 Folklore, 74 Food banks, 198, 207 security, 89, 92n9 Force armed, 410 auxiliary, 348, 353 government, 170 life-, 64, 65, 67, 76

441

opposition, 151, 170n36 security, 326, 329, 331, 350, 421 Forest, 64, 67, 69, 105, 251, 274 Forgiveness, 103 Fortes, Meyer, 9 Fortification, 108 Foucault, Michel, 2, 3, 8, 20, 112, 187, 295, 296, 313, 408, 412, 414, 415 Fraud, 18, 421, 427 Frazer, James George, 5 Freedom of expression, 149 of the press, 91n8 Frontier, 125, 252 Fund-raising, 165 G Geingob, Hage (politician), 197, 198, 200, 210, 211, 281, 285 Gender, 204n23, 239, 257, 269, 285 Genealogy, 71 Generation, 15, 32, 34, 43, 44, 47, 52, 81, 104, 148, 150, 160, 160n22, 163n26, 166, 168–170, 199, 209, 234, 276, 300, 306, 307, 407 -set, 155, 157, 162, 166–168 Geopolitics, 295 Germany, 19, 383 Gerontocracy, 166n30, 200 Gift, 11, 103, 104, 107, 194, 197n10, 198n14 divine, 14, 108 Globalization, 3, 296, 325 Gluckman, Max, 129, 130 Goat, 72, 93n10, 138, 225, 280, 364 God, 7, 92, 93, 95, 97, 101–103, 107, 164n27, 198n14, 207, 299, 339, 387, 387n12, 389n16, 399, 427

442 

INDEX

Gogo (ethnic group), 44 Good and evil, 14 Governance humanitarian, 414 mixed, 129 participatory, 21 postcolonial, 140 puppet, 71 righteous, 175 state, 152, 171n38 Grace, 425 divine, 94 Graeber, David, 7, 9, 111, 140, 187, 324, 328 Grave, 72, 76, 98, 300, 307 Graveyard, 91, 96, 99, 304 Grazer, 280–282 Guardian, 77, 136 Guardianship, 141 Guerrilla, 256, 407, 409–411, 421, 426 Gun, 77, 96, 136, 319, 348, 350, 355, 357, 358, 362, 363, 365, 366, 369, 370 H Habitus, 379, 408, 412 Haile Selassie I (politician), 409 Hailemariam Desalegn (politician), 152 Hair, 69, 412 Hamar (ethnic group), 125, 130n10, 131, 134 Harassment, 130 Harris, Kevin, 377–379, 381, 389–400, 390n17, 392n18, 393n20, 393n21, 395n23 Hatred, 39 Hauck, Gerhard, 140 Headman, 67, 89, 94, 96, 227, 249, 274

Headmanship, 269 Healer local, 96, 99, 102 spirit, 100 traditional, 6, 88n2, 304, 391 Healing prayer, 102 public, 64 Health, 18, 72, 81, 100, 193, 209, 358, 406 Heat, 66 Hegemony, 8, 67, 112 definitional, 14, 20, 176 Heir, 68–70, 82, 90, 231 Herbst, Susan, 3, 378, 379, 396 Herero (ethnic group), 191, 249, 269, 274, 280–282 Heritage archaeological heritage management, 310 cultural, 151, 169, 268, 310, 313 identificatory, 156 national heritage sites, 17, 301 trust, 302 Heterogeneity, 30, 75, 110 Hierarchy state, 156 symbolic, 162 unquestionable, 427 Highland, 125, 127, 137n15, 156, 324, 328, 409, 412 Hima (ethnic group), 71 Himba (ethnic group), 269 Hinda (ethnic group), 71 History legal, 70 oral, 45, 46, 131, 160n22, 304 world, 29, 73 Homeland, 37, 137, 227, 256, 376, 381, 385, 396, 397 Homogeneity, 75, 76, 110 Homogenisation, 167

 INDEX 

Homologation, 330, 331 Honey, 138 Hostility, 416, 420, 422 Household, 71, 131, 143, 192, 193, 197, 197n10, 226, 249, 251, 255, 257, 259–262, 279, 353n4, 365 Hunters and gatherers, 16 Hunting, 138, 250–252, 255, 258, 260, 262, 263, 279 I Identity building, 169 construction, 31, 52 ethnic, 64, 80, 88n5 national, 12, 30, 78, 154, 166, 169, 174, 394 political, 53 Ideologisation, 153 Ideology government, 166 public, 153n12 religious, 74 of salvation, 385 socialist, 152 Illness, 76, 100 Immigrant, 33, 249, 277, 279–281 illegal, 279–281 Imperialism, 253 Impoverishment, 410 Inauguration, 73, 95, 99, 152 Inclusion and exclusion, 379 Income, 186, 190–200, 197n10, 197n11, 205, 206, 208–211, 226, 249, 259, 279, 323, 331 Basic Income Grant Project (BIG), 186, 190, 193–197, 198n13, 198n14, 203, 205–210 Independence, 36, 51, 64, 78, 79, 92n9, 190, 191, 203n20, 206,

443

223, 258–262, 268, 269, 297, 298, 324, 348, 392, 398, 399, 409, 411 India, 35, 46, 152n9 Indian Ocean, 31, 35, 46, 48 Indigeneity, 313 Indirect rule, see Rule Individualism, 123n3 Individualization, 6 Industrialization, 6 Ineffectiveness, 349 Inequality, 12, 89n5, 313, 381 racial, 12 Influence, 2, 12, 39, 44, 45, 52, 79, 95, 132–134, 139n17, 172, 187, 189, 191, 211, 223, 231, 251, 258, 284, 285, 307, 328, 365, 396, 408, 419 Infrastructure, 128, 196, 259, 352 Inheritance, 106, 148, 298 Initiation, 13, 66, 69, 74, 78–80, 82, 95, 98, 192, 338, 339 Injustice, 140, 195, 399, 412 Innovation, 7, 139, 160, 203 Insecurity, 320, 321, 324, 327–332, 335, 343, 349–351, 357, 358, 367, 368, 407, 410, 417 Institution cultural, 12 disciplinary, 414, 426 global, 4, 21 governmental, 16, 18, 166, 199, 250, 414 legal, 17, 21, 327 political, 9, 13, 129, 188, 238 religious, 3 royal, 66 social, 4, 5, 134 state, 12, 14, 17, 141–143, 268, 426 Instrument, 12, 103, 280, 313, 327, 329, 340, 352, 357, 362, 366, 424

444 

INDEX

Insurgency, 67 Integration, 16, 53, 55, 64, 70, 124, 127, 132, 331, 385, 388 Integrity, 14, 15, 124n4, 153, 198, 212, 393n20 Interdisciplinarity, 3 Intermarriage, 156, 251, 254 Intermediary, 46, 142, 230, 328, 421, 425 Internationalization, 3 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 418 Internet, 169, 175 Intimidation, 130 Invasions, 107, 277, 278, 280 Investment, 127, 152 Irony, 128 Islam, 34, 42, 45, 46, 101n15, 102, 110, 407 Islamophobia, 105 Isolation, 358, 410, 416 J Jealousy, 98, 260, 420 Jesus (religious figure), 101–103 Joshua (religious figure), 94 Joshua, T. B. (evangelist), 93, 93n10 Journalism, 377 Judge, 67, 76, 78, 96, 167, 273 Judgement, 224, 398 Ju/’hoansi (ethnic group), see San (ethnic group) Junta, 127, 415 Jurisdiction, 74, 75, 97, 129, 348 Justice, 97, 135, 137, 192, 297, 312, 377, 389n16 social, 16, 185–212, 284 Justification, 3, 112, 140, 187, 253n7, 380

K Kachin (ethnic group), 125n6 Kameeta, Zephania (politician), 192, 196, 198, 199, 205–208, 210, 211 Kaptien, 230 Kara (ethnic group), 14, 121–144 Kavango (ethnic group), 253, 269, 270, 272 Kenya, 14, 17, 19, 122, 125, 150, 312, 348–359, 361–370, 405, 414 Khoekhoen (ethnic group), 246 Nama, 7, 191, 249, 269 Topnaar, 15 Khoikhoi (ethnic group), see Khoekhoen (ethnic group) Kikuyu (ethnic group), 352 King, 65–67, 66n1, 74, 76–78, 80, 81, 137n15, 140, 155, 250, 251, 253, 269 Kingdom bandit, 349, 350 merina, 325 Kingship, 65, 76 sacred, 136 Kinship, 9, 77, 94, 97, 131n12, 230, 247, 252, 273, 274, 325, 407 Knowledge cultic, 72 expert, 4 initiatory, 64, 67 local, 5, 99, 107, 313, 361 occult, 14, 90 ritual, 92 secret, 4, 389 social, 408 systems, 5, 295–297, 305, 307, 308, 310, 312 theory of, 113 traditional, 169, 313 Kunama (ethnic group), 410

 INDEX 

L Labour black, 385 contract, 257 forced, 75 Land allocation, 16, 275, 277–279, 284 ancestral, 294, 309, 310, 311n5, 312 boards, 268 claims, 16, 281 communal, 7, 268, 270, 279, 300, 309 reform, 285 resettlement, 301 rush, 280 state, 310 use, 16, 247, 256, 259–263, 271, 274, 284 Language, 33, 34, 43, 51, 53, 54, 66, 69, 69n3, 88n5, 122n2, 123, 131n11, 132, 134, 143, 151, 157, 175, 246–249, 248n3, 249n5, 268, 273, 311n5, 330, 381, 388, 389, 391, 393, 419 Law colonial, 64 customary, 234, 268, 285, 308–310, 308n3 international, 30, 312 popular, 329 traditional, 155 Lawlessness, 349, 350 Leader charismatic, 105, 224, 334 neotraditional, 130, 220, 228, 230–233, 235, 237–239 political, 14, 269, 284, 362 religious, 98, 253 ritual, 14, 122, 123, 131, 133–135, 139, 141 spiritual, 88, 130, 135

445

traditional, 14, 66n1, 130, 143, 228, 268, 269, 283, 284, 309 war, 136 Leadership authoritarian, 411 egalitarian, 276 neotraditional, 188, 220, 227, 229–231, 233–239 Legacy, 22, 30, 47–51, 94, 103, 125, 166, 175, 203n20 Legality, 88–97, 109n20, 187, 302, 393 Legitimacy alternative, 7 hybrid, 13, 19, 64 moral, 3, 187, 189, 196, 199, 207, 210, 211, 294, 380, 389, 397, 398 neo-traditional, 64 performative, 7, 189, 195–197, 199, 211 plural, 17–20, 342 political, 15, 64, 147–149, 175 public, 123, 212 regimes of, 4, 82 registers of, 323, 327 traditional, 231 Legitimization, 1–22 Leopard, 73, 77, 170n35 Liberation, 36, 191, 256–258, 262, 297n2, 298, 409, 411, 420, 421, 426 Lies, 50, 65, 95, 97, 98, 103, 129, 135, 169, 275, 279, 365, 379, 399 Life-Worlds, 397, 425–427 Lineage matri, 94, 97, 99 patri, 155n18 Livelihood, 123, 125, 128, 226, 245n1, 247, 249, 251, 258, 280

446 

INDEX

Livestock, 164n27, 225, 226, 237, 245n1, 248, 249, 251, 252, 260, 262, 348n2, 353n4, 355, 357–360, 365, 367, 370, 418 Locusts, 138 Lomwe (ethnic group), 95n12, 102 Lourenço, Joao (politician), 81 Lowland, 128, 130, 137n15, 143 Loyalty, 11, 18, 21, 51, 106, 139, 173, 174, 188, 195, 199–208, 211, 226, 262, 362, 368, 370, 417, 425 Luchazi (ethnic group), 80 Lukes, Steven, 7, 105, 132–134, 141–143 Luunda (ethnic group), 77 Luvale (ethnic group), 80, 81 Luya (ethnic group), 135 Lynching, 326 M Madagascar, 17, 19, 35, 140, 319–343 Madness, 99 Mafwe (ethnic group), 269 Magic, 17, 109, 319–343 Magician, 335 Majority, 18, 31–33, 35, 36, 44, 51, 93, 153n11, 170n36, 189, 192, 229, 238, 239, 248, 249n4, 262, 297, 329, 375, 376n3, 383, 395n23 Malan, Daniel F. (politician), 269, 383, 384 Malawi, 14, 87–113 Malawi Congress Party (MCP, political party), 89, 91 Mandela, Nelson (politician), 222 Mang’anja (ethnic group), 89n5, 95n12 Mangbetu (ethnic group), 65, 75

Manipulation, 2, 8, 13, 52, 54, 132, 134, 187, 356, 393n21, 407, 418 Mannheim, Karl, 169 Manvu (ethnic group), 75 Marginalization, 225, 349, 356, 358 Market, 140, 204n21, 313, 329, 358, 367, 369, 421 slave, 35, 36, 41, 46, 48, 50 Marriage, 80, 137, 138n16, 138–139n17, 251 Marshal, John, 274 Martyr, 87n1, 88n1 Marx, Karl, 9, 152 Marxism, 9, 152 Mask, 79–81 Massacre Baragoi, 361, 363, 366, 367 Gukurahundi, 298 Sharpeville, 378n4, 385 Matrilineality, 77, 97, 251 Mauritius, 35 Mayogo (ethnic group), 75 Meaning, 7, 42, 55, 66, 67, 78, 81, 82, 100, 105, 113, 129, 148, 149, 169, 212, 223, 224, 227, 232, 328, 331, 332, 332n6, 339–342, 393 Media communication, 131n11, 377, 379 mass, 379, 392 new, 157, 396–398 social, 131n11, 425 Mediation, 69, 136, 379, 396, 398–400 Medicine initiatory, 68–70, 74 life, 13, 63–65, 67, 70, 72–74, 78 political, 64 protective, 77 rain, 67, 68, 70–73, 76 ritual, 64 traditional, 96, 108

 INDEX 

Medium, 69, 122, 129, 132, 383, 393, 395n23, 397, 400 spirit, 300, 304, 306, 307 Meles Zenawi (politician), 409, 419, 424 Memorial, 32, 48, 49 Memory, 31, 32, 39, 45–47, 50–53, 55, 169, 407 politics of, 45, 48 Mengistu Haile Mariam (politician), 415 Merina (ethnic group), 140, 325, 330 Meru (ethnic group), 352 Messianism, 94 Metaphor, 425 Migrant, 36, 82, 385, 414 Migration, 18, 71, 80, 81, 252, 406, 408, 410, 412, 414, 415, 419, 421, 424, 427 Militarisation, 407, 410 Military, 87, 104n16, 127, 150n4, 151, 151n8, 156, 201, 257, 329, 337, 366, 369, 409–416, 422, 424 Mining, 17, 294, 299, 300, 302–304, 306–308, 311, 313, 324 Miracle, 103, 107, 391 Misfortune, 135, 137, 138n16, 339 Missionary, 257 activity, 251, 253–256 society, 253 station, 251 Mistrust, 18, 156, 206, 407, 410, 416, 417, 422, 424, 426, 427 Mkutu, Kennedy, 347–349, 353, 358, 359, 362, 365, 367 Mobilisation, 202n19 political, 424 Mobutu, Joseph Désiré (politician), 53, 75, 79

447

Modernism, 5, 111 Modernity, 313 alternative, 298, 313 post, 10, 111 Modernization, 6, 111, 328 Moi, Daniel arap (politician), 354 Money, 55, 89, 101, 141, 165, 192, 194–197, 197n10, 197n11, 206, 207, 228, 298, 331, 389n14, 394, 422 Monument, 17, 235, 293, 294, 299–301, 303, 304, 310 Morality, 7, 54, 89, 97–100, 105–111, 113, 148, 377, 393 political, 88, 149 Morris, Brian, 110 Moses (religious figure), 91, 93, 94 Movement liberation, 52, 256–258, 262, 409 political, 170n36, 188n3 revolutionary, 147 student, 170n35, 410 youth, 170n36 Mozambique, 34, 35 Mpasu, Sam (politician), 95, 96 Mugabe, Robert (politician), 298, 301, 309 Muluzi, Bakili (politician), 88–92, 89n5, 96 Mun (ethnic group), 130, 130n10, 134, 134n14 Museum, 32, 160, 293, 300, 301, 303, 304, 310 Mutharika, Arthur Peter (politician), 94 Mutharika, Bingu wa (politician), 88, 88n5, 90–93, 91n8, 92n9, 95n12 Myth founding, 152 making, 397

448 

INDEX

N Nama (ethnic group), see Khoekhoen (ethnic group) Namibia, 15, 16, 19, 185, 186, 188, 190–196, 197n11, 200, 201, 202n19, 203n20, 205, 206, 208, 209, 219–240, 245–264, 267–286 Narrative, 6, 13, 19, 89, 92n9, 105, 107, 112, 156, 298, 382, 387n12, 392, 397, 426 meta, 5 Nation building, 29–55, 260, 263, 298 state, 4, 19, 30, 51, 53, 130, 267, 279, 376, 412 Nationalism, 376, 383, 384, 396, 399 Afrikaner, 376, 376n3, 400 Nationality, 35, 127, 148 Nationhood, 54 Native intellectual, 10 reserves, 300, 309 Nature, 2, 10, 31, 53, 89, 94, 107, 111, 122, 123, 138, 154, 219, 227, 228, 282, 332n6, 337, 339, 341, 348, 368, 370, 378, 393 Neglect, 128, 350, 358, 370 Nepotism, 9, 191, 322, 324 Network broadcast, 169 criminal, 324, 326, 421 political, 175 social, 194, 197 News, 4, 90, 93, 93n10, 94, 148, 161, 204, 392n18, 399n24 fake, 22 Newspapers, 18, 90, 167, 168n33, 189, 190, 198n14, 205, 229, 232, 326, 329, 381, 383, 386n11, 388, 389n16, 390–394, 393n20, 397, 400

Ngoni (ethnic group), 89n5, 92 Nigeria, 93 Nobel Peace Prize, 152 Nobility, 137n15 Nomadism, 246, 250–255, 260–263 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), 91, 93, 121, 141, 231, 246, 261, 367, 395, 416, 418–419, 425 See also Organization Normativity, 7, 21, 108, 320, 327, 328, 341–343 Norway, 172 Nuer (ethnic group), 136 Nujoma, Sam (politician), 200–202, 202n18, 205 Nyamweda (ethnic group), 293, 294, 299–302, 308, 309, 311, 312 Nyamwezi (ethnic group), 71 Nyangatom (ethnic group), 125, 130n10, 134, 135, 350 Nyerere, Julius (politician), 30, 47–51, 54, 78 O Obedience, 127, 201, 203n19, 207, 211, 224, 420 Obligation, 16, 137, 230, 285 Obsequiousness, 16 Occultism, 14, 89, 90, 92, 93, 98, 187 Office -holder, 14, 107, 143 political, 72, 74, 96, 106, 358 traditional, 124, 143, 144, 191, 234, 235, 237 Officer, 260, 354–357, 367, 368, 388, 418 police, 42, 47, 96, 302, 353, 356, 360, 362, 366 Omnipotence, 103, 397

 INDEX 

Operation, 52, 163, 298, 303, 349, 362, 363, 391 political, 18 Opinion, 33, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 153, 186, 200, 202, 203, 237, 256, 274, 279 public, 134, 379 Opposition, 2, 19, 20, 36, 67, 68, 91, 92, 96, 148, 151, 152, 166, 169, 170n36, 171n38, 173, 175, 186, 196, 199, 200, 232, 254, 377, 379, 394, 395, 411, 415, 417, 419–420, 422, 424, 425 Oppression, 8, 36, 78, 188, 296, 297, 350, 411 Oracle, 68, 69 Ordeal, 138 Order moral, 110 political, 230, 408 polito-legal, 175 public, 331 social, 20, 99, 100, 109n20, 111, 136, 140, 142, 224, 225, 424 socio-sosmic, 105 of succession, 155, 166 Organization non-governmental, 414 political, 5, 6, 15, 30, 230 Orlam (ethnic group), 226 Oromo (ethnic group) Arsii, 148n2, 160 Boorana, 148n2, 154, 154n15, 160n20, 162, 170n35 Macca, 148n2, 160 Tuulama, 148n2, 154, 156, 160, 162 Oromo Democratic Party (ODP) (political party), 152, 153, 169, 172, 172n41, 173 Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), 151n8, 172

449

Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), 151, 151n8, 153, 169, 172, 173 Oromo Peoples’ Democratic Organization (OPDO), 151–153, 162, 169, 172 Ovambo (ethnic group), 191, 253, 269, 285 Ovawambo (ethnic group), see Ovambo (ethnic group) Ownership, 16, 143, 229, 239, 302, 304, 305, 307–309, 357, 365 P Pacification, 153 Palace, 68, 70–72, 90, 90–91n7, 423 Panic, 171 Paramountcy, 64, 78, 82 Parliament, 36, 53, 165, 190, 191, 195, 199, 202, 205, 377, 384–386 member of, 96, 386n11 Parsons, Talcott, 6, 104n16 Participation, 9, 121n1, 123n3, 149, 157, 168, 231, 284, 310, 362, 370 Partnership, 134, 139n17, 163 Party (political), 8, 15, 149, 166, 188, 188n3, 203, 205, 285, 298, 415, 419 Passivity, 385, 414, 418 Pastor, 102, 107, 254, 260 Pastoralism, 246 agro-, 129 Pastoralist, 128, 134, 154, 274, 281, 348–352, 356–359, 361, 365, 367, 368, 370 agro-, 123, 125, 251, 410 Paternalism, 261 Peace building, 360 -making, 81, 139

450 

INDEX

Pemba, 35 Pension, 192, 196–198, 197n11, 198n13, 198n14, 204, 207, 209, 226, 249 Pentecostalism, see Christianity Peoples, 2, 4, 7, 9, 16–18, 21, 22, 29, 32, 36, 39, 42–48, 50–55, 64, 67, 70–74, 78, 80–82, 88, 90, 90n7, 91, 95, 97–103, 112, 122, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133–136, 138, 138n16, 140–143, 169, 190, 193, 195–197, 197n10, 200, 203, 204, 206–210, 212, 220–222, 225, 228, 245n1, 246, 248–251, 254–257, 258n9, 259–263, 268, 273–282, 284, 285, 293, 294, 294n1, 297n2, 305–307, 308n3, 309, 311–313, 311n5, 325, 326, 329, 332, 338, 349, 350, 355, 377, 380–383, 385, 386, 389n14, 389n15, 390, 396, 398, 399, 410–413, 415, 420, 421 indigenous, 33, 245, 261, 308, 309, 311–313, 311n5 People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), 257 Performance, 78, 88, 157, 204, 204n23, 207, 208, 294, 298, 380, 411 Periphery, 18, 111, 140, 246, 349, 350 Persia, 33 Persuasion, 134, 221, 222, 386 Philosophy, 142, 148, 149, 166, 171, 171n37, 219 Pilgrimage, 160n22, 164, 164n28 Place, 4, 7, 17, 32, 33, 41, 42, 46, 69, 90n7, 92, 98, 108, 122, 123, 136, 147, 154, 155, 162–165, 167, 170, 174, 185, 186, 191, 192, 196, 197, 197n10, 224,

228, 233n10, 250, 252, 258, 261, 282, 293, 294n1, 296, 299, 306, 307, 309, 311, 312, 321, 327, 339, 340, 351, 358, 362, 367, 368, 380, 392n19, 408, 413–415, 423 holy, 164 Plantation, 35, 36, 48 Plants, 69, 135, 255, 279–281, 303, 339 Pluralism analytical, 19 epistemic, 17, 295, 313 legal, 74, 97n14 Plurality, 5, 10, 21, 110, 296 Plutocracy, 9 Pohamba, Hifikepunye (politician), 195, 196, 200, 205, 205n25, 275 Poison, 78 Pokot (ethnic group), 361, 362, 367 Police Ethiopian Police Reserves (EPRs), 351 Kenya Police Reserves (KPR), 17, 18, 347–371 Policy colonial, 75 Homeland, 376, 385 identity, 153, 174 racial, 253 Politician, 14, 47, 88, 88n1, 90, 91n7, 96, 98, 100, 102, 170, 189, 190, 194, 195, 199, 204n21, 207, 329, 342, 365–368, 378, 383, 384, 395 Politicisation, 420 Politics of the belly, 322 chameleon, 110 of extraction, 305, 313 national, 48, 88, 88n4, 95

 INDEX 

Polity, 51, 65, 77, 123, 125, 127, 128, 137, 142, 149, 221 Pollution, 135 Polygyny, 138n17, 139n17 Popitz, Heinrich, 220, 223, 238 Portugal, 34, 80 Possession, 34, 35, 67, 302, 303, 341 spirit, 335 Post-colony, 12, 21, 295, 296, 305, 314 Poverty, 192, 195, 198, 207, 210, 261, 359, 383, 384 Power ancestral, 13 authoritative, 3, 16, 223, 224, 224n2, 247, 248, 254 change, 166 cosmic, 13 definitional, 173–176 discursive, 175 dynamics, 263, 412 hidden, 342 -holders, 16, 187, 189 imbalances, 10 institutionalized, 8, 15, 227 knowledge, 8, 112, 295 legitimate, 8n1, 9, 20 medicinal, 66, 76 misuse of, 16 occult, 89 of the people, 9, 112 political, 2, 3, 13, 15, 79, 81, 154, 196, 199, 210, 211, 284, 298, 305, 366 regimes of, 321 relations, 3, 15, 18, 19, 187, 208, 220, 231, 389, 393, 398, 400, 408, 426 sources of, 4, 19, 52, 87–113, 187 supernatural, 134, 135 tactical and organizational, 8 traditions of, 9

451

Powerlessness, 223, 418 Pragmatism, 416 Prayer, 91, 102, 164, 164n27, 171, 235, 237, 339 Presidency, 89, 89n5, 92n9, 93, 95n12, 201, 354 President, 78, 81, 88–94, 93n10, 166, 196–198, 200, 201, 204–207, 210, 211, 275, 285, 301, 309, 409, 411, 420 Press, 91n8, 164, 189, 190n4, 200, 204, 207, 210, 378, 389, 392, 395 Prestige, 138, 142, 163 Priest, 10, 134n14 Primogeniture, 167 Primordialism, 79 Primus inter pares, 226 Prison, 96, 331, 410, 412, 414, 415 Prisoner, 151, 424 political, 152, 170n34 Privacy, 69 Privilege, 9, 10, 14, 21, 76, 200, 357, 420, 424 Profit, 4, 35, 50, 122, 143, 337, 358, 406 Prohibition, 138, 138n16 Propaganda, 50, 256, 378, 383, 389, 396, 410, 416, 424 Property, 55, 103, 262, 302, 308, 313, 320, 349, 350, 353n4, 358, 367, 422 communal, 309, 312, 358 Prophecy, 93n10 Prophet, 93, 95, 386 false, 103 Prosperity Party (political party), 173 Protection, 17, 32, 43, 76, 77, 81, 91n7, 297, 311, 312, 320, 325, 332, 339, 359, 361, 368, 407, 414, 418, 422, 424 social, 209

452 

INDEX

Protectorate, 36 Protest, 165n29, 170n34, 171, 385, 409 Protester, 170, 170n34, 171 Publicity, 157 Purity, 68, 78 Q Queen, 71, 77 Qur’an, 95 R Race, 47, 294n1, 393 Radio, 81, 91, 229, 234, 329, 381, 388 Raider, 136, 325, 354n6, 359–364, 366, 367 Raiding cattle, 325, 326, 370 commercialised, 356 Rain ceremony, 17 Rain-making, 306 Rain-petitioning, 299, 300, 305, 306 Rajoelina, Andry (politician), 326, 327n3 Rangelands, 128 pastoralist, 349 Ranger, Terence O., 6, 7, 322, 368, 369 Rank, 18, 69, 72, 94, 133, 203, 276, 355, 356, 362 Rapprochement, 153, 173 Rationality, 111, 223, 341, 386, 386n11, 407 Rationalization, 5, 6 Ravalomanana, Marc (politician), 326 Reality, 2–4, 8, 10, 11, 22, 33, 109–111, 113, 175, 228, 298, 307, 377, 396, 407

Rebellion, 347, 353 Rebirth, 73, 151–154 Reciprocity, 139, 140, 224, 252, 273, 306 Recognition, 5, 12, 14, 15, 30, 75, 90, 105, 107, 112, 163, 212, 221–225, 247, 263, 268, 270, 285, 321, 351n3 Reconciliation, 406, 422–424 Redistribution, 133, 209, 298 Reform, 152, 172, 209, 260, 311 Refuge, 136, 251, 343 Refugee camps, 275, 405–427 Council, 418 urban, 406, 414, 416, 420 Regime, 4, 79, 82, 88n5, 90, 91n7, 144, 151, 186, 186n1, 321, 415, 417, 419, 420, 422, 424–426 military, 409, 415 Regionalism, 51 Relation, 14, 16, 19, 30, 39, 42–44, 47, 50, 112, 123, 125, 125n6, 127, 128, 131, 143, 152n9, 194, 199, 200, 212, 221, 223, 230, 232, 249n5, 252, 282, 297, 299, 307, 349–352, 378, 380, 388, 398–400, 407, 424, 427 Relationship asymmetrical, 203, 224 authoritative, 203, 224 hierarchical, 211, 219, 221, 238 patron-client, 262, 263, 366 social, 3, 107, 263, 297, 305, 322 socio-cosmological, 3, 108, 108n19, 112 Relativism, 105n18, 175 Religion, 1, 14, 32, 34, 44, 51, 64, 97, 111, 153, 221 Rendille (ethnic group), 355, 362

 INDEX 

Renewal democratic, 149 political, 171 Reparation, 260, 312 Repatriation, 172 Representation, 5, 6, 10, 13, 19, 29–55, 64, 68, 76, 127, 149, 154, 163, 175, 247, 282, 378n4, 380, 396 Repression, 18, 405, 411 Republic, 199, 375, 384, 387 Boer, 375 Reputation, 13, 69, 91n8, 100, 139, 149, 185, 187, 194, 335 Research, 1, 3, 10, 11, 18–20, 31–34, 38, 39, 88n3, 88n5, 111, 122n2, 124, 124n4, 127, 128, 130n10, 148, 148n2, 153, 163n26, 188–190, 193, 204n22, 210–212, 232–234, 245, 245n1, 247–249, 258n9, 295, 321, 322, 329, 332, 378, 381, 382, 384, 391, 418 policy, 19 Resettlement, 227, 260, 276, 301, 406, 416–418, 420, 421 Resistance, 20, 51, 67, 78, 128, 150, 151n8, 188, 199, 202n18, 206, 211, 227, 231, 234, 350, 385, 409, 411, 424 Resolution, 54, 274, 383 conflict, 136, 153 Resources, 4, 21, 52, 92n9, 108, 130, 169, 186, 192, 194, 196, 204n21, 207, 209, 220, 223, 228, 230, 231, 252, 261, 262, 267, 270, 278, 280, 281, 284, 307, 308, 312, 321–324, 350, 358, 380 Respect, 11–13, 18, 19, 51, 53, 66, 127, 137, 138, 188, 195, 199–207, 211,

453

224, 226, 231, 236, 236n14, 246, 247, 312, 321, 327n3, 334, 342 Responsibility, 98, 99, 102, 137, 207, 237, 239, 257, 282, 353n4, 354, 358, 367, 368, 407 Restoration, 162, 260, 298 Reunion, 35 Revenge, 37, 227, 360 Revenue, 228, 230, 359 Revitalization, 147, 262 Revival, 157, 162, 188, 343 Revolt, 67 Revolution bureaucratic, 157–159 industrial, 48 Rhetoric political, 148, 313, 329 visual, 165 Rhodesia, 297, 300, 305, 309 Richness, 20, 69, 72, 97–99, 101, 105, 191, 313, 386 Rights citizen’s, 329 human, 152, 261, 295, 320, 327, 331, 341, 419 land, 16, 225, 245–264, 270, 274, 277, 279, 281, 309 legal, 302, 327 Ritual, 9, 11, 14, 64, 65, 67, 69, 72, 73, 78, 81, 82, 89, 90–91n7, 91, 92, 95–100, 107–110, 108n19, 122, 123, 123n3, 128, 131, 133–139, 138n16, 141, 142, 155, 157, 160n22, 164, 164n27, 164n28, 168, 174, 293, 294, 298, 306, 338n9, 338n10, 411 regional, 155, 174 Rivalry, 80, 410 River, 68, 80, 164n28, 275, 299, 338, 410 Robbery, 370

454 

INDEX

Rule, 70, 125, 139, 223, 359 arbitrary, 407 colonial, 67, 87, 150, 190, 253, 375 customary, 129 dictatory, 408, 411, 426 illegitimate, 149 indirect, 7, 65, 70, 125, 139, 223, 359 of law, 9 medicinal, 65, 68–74 party, 152 postcolonial, 220 self-, 79, 411 socialist, 156 state, 128 Ruler, 74, 77, 78, 89, 143, 150n4, 220, 226, 379, 380 precolonial, 64, 65 Rumour, 90, 91n8, 93, 418, 424 Rupture, 328, 410 Rwanda, 65 S Sacredness, 66, 109n20, 331, 337 Sacrifice, 73, 108, 142, 385 Sahlins, Marshall, 7, 111, 252 Saint, 102 Salvation, 105, 385 Samburu (ethnic group), 17, 352, 353, 355, 357–370, 366n13, 368n14 San (ethnic group), 270, 272–274, 281, 282, 284 ǂAkhoe, 249, 249n5, 252–254, 258–261, 263 Ju|’hoan, 246, 247, 252 Khwe, 270, 275–277 !Kung, 16, 270, 274–277 !Xun, 16, 245–264, 276, 277 Sanction, 133, 135, 138, 202, 223, 225, 227, 260, 274

Satan, 93, 95, 97, 101, 103 Satanism, 89, 92, 106 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 359 School, 5, 32, 46–51, 71, 101n15, 102, 110, 157, 163n26, 197n10, 203, 228, 257, 414, 419 missionary, 51 Science political, 3, 53, 199 social, 5, 6, 64, 103, 221, 295 Sculpture, 50, 165 Seclusion, 69 Secrecy, 106, 109, 375–400 Secret societies, see Society Secularism post-, 111 Secularization, 6, 328 Security agencies, 157 on the cheap, 348, 356, 365 private, 362, 367 social, 11, 76, 78, 81, 82 Sedentarization, 255, 263 Segregation, 190, 250, 309, 379n5, 384n9, 414 Self-determination, 76, 150, 427 Self-rule, see Rule Semantics, 122, 122n2, 136, 147 Sena (ethnic group), 89n5 Seniority, 13, 66, 82, 162, 164, 356 Separatism, 51 Serfdom, 137n15 Service intelligence, 154 national, 406, 407, 410, 412 National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS), 416 Settlement, 34, 135, 141, 185, 192, 196, 197n10, 206, 252, 255, 258n9, 262, 281, 350, 376

 INDEX 

Settler, 79, 257, 297, 300, 304, 305, 307, 308, 308n3, 310, 347, 353, 383 soldier-, 127 Sexuality, 99 Seychelles, 35 Sheep, 138, 225, 364 Shirazi (ethnic group), 33, 34, 36 Shrine, 72–74, 100 rain, 68 Sigrist, Christian, 125n6, 128n9, 135, 139n17 Silence, 382, 394, 396–398 Simmel, Georg, 379, 380 Sin, 48 Slave, 13, 29–55, 90n7, 251 Slavery, 13, 37, 42, 49 Smuggler, 410, 419, 421 Social Constructionism, 5, 6, 8, 104, 322, 393 Socialism, 78 Sociality, 19, 306, 427 Society civil, 30, 140, 189, 320, 327, 329, 341–343 medicinal, 69, 73 open (see Initiative) plural, 250–253 secret, 18, 90n7, 376, 376n3, 382, 384 Solidarity, 54, 73, 76, 128, 328, 412, 422 Sorcery, 98 South Africa, 18, 19, 188–191, 195, 196n9, 197n11, 227, 256, 284, 375–400, 405 South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), 377, 381, 382, 382n7, 388–392, 388n13, 389n15, 392n18, 393n20, 394, 395, 395n22, 397, 398, 399n24, 400

455

South Sudan, 14, 122, 125, 358, 405 South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO), 191, 201–205, 202n19, 203n20, 208, 256–258, 262, 275 Sovereign, 30, 66, 66n1, 129, 422 Sovereignty, 130, 141, 323 Soweto, 18, 389n16, 390, 391, 393, 393n20, 397 Space discursive, 175 office, 156, 157 sacred, 293–314 ungoverned, 17, 347–371 urban, 165, 169 Spies, 421, 422 Spirit angelic, 101 dynastic, 76 evil, 90 medium, 300, 304, 306, 307 nature, 332n6, 337, 339, 341 possession, 335 Stability, 87, 153, 221, 328, 396 State colonial, 30, 296 developmental, 127, 128, 130, 152 federal, 151, 174 -formation, 65, 375, 379 imperial, 156 nation-, 4, 19, 30, 51, 53, 130, 267, 279, 376, 412 non-, 10, 122, 123, 349, 351, 352, 356–358, 370 post-colonial, 12–13, 29–31, 51, 53, 54, 70, 140, 223, 324, 379 shadow, 323–325 Statehood, 127 Statue, 159

456 

INDEX

Status, 6, 8n1, 13, 32, 36, 46, 48, 66, 75, 87, 94, 97, 98, 109n20, 112, 138n16, 139n17, 154, 170n35, 200, 204, 228, 229, 276, 278, 296, 328, 342, 379, 382, 387n12, 389n16, 395, 399, 414, 416, 417 Stratification, 162, 191 age-, 150 Struggle, 16, 48, 70, 82, 105, 107, 112, 148, 150, 169, 170, 173, 175, 229, 232, 238, 247, 257, 263, 284, 295, 297, 297n2, 350, 382, 410, 411, 420, 421, 426 Strydom, Hans (politician), 376, 376n3, 384, 385, 387n12, 389n16 Subiya (ethnic group), 269 Subjugation, 51, 226, 311n5 Submission, 188, 405–427 Subordination, 3, 188, 203n19, 204, 204n22, 207, 224, 225, 322 Subtractability, 247, 248, 248n2, 261–263 Subversion, 67, 415, 424 Succession, 68, 70, 71, 77, 80, 97, 136, 155, 166, 228 Sudan, 405, 414, 419, 421, 425 Suffering, 51, 72, 100, 128, 192, 407 Sugar cane, 35 Sukuma (ethnic group), 13, 63–82 Sultanate, 34 Superiority, 3, 322 Supremacy, 381 white, 18, 376, 385 Suri (ethnic group), 122, 123, 130, 130n10, 133, 134, 134n14, 136, 137n15, 138, 142, 143, 350 Surma (ethnic group), see Suri (ethnic group) Surveillance, 348, 416, 422 Suspicion, 71, 139, 200, 205, 424

Swahili (ethnic group), 32–36, 39, 43, 51, 54 Swahilization, 33 Symbol, 15, 77, 105, 150, 154, 157, 165, 172, 189, 231n9, 332n5, 339, 366, 388 ritual, 64 Symbolism, 92n9, 165, 170, 173 Symmetry, 72, 74 Syncretism, 339 T Taboo, 68, 135, 138, 138n16, 339 Tanzania, 13, 19, 29–55, 63–65, 68, 70, 79, 82 Tax, 75, 209, 308 Technology, 5, 69, 252, 388, 415 Television (TV), 18, 157, 168, 329, 377, 378, 388–399, 389n14, 395n22 Tembo, John (politician), 91, 92 Territorialism, 79 Territoriality, 68, 252 Territory, 1, 2, 7, 17, 33–35, 44, 64, 75, 79, 112, 127, 137, 137n15, 155, 156, 164, 272, 273, 311n5, 312, 325, 328n4, 352, 376, 385, 396, 407, 409, 411, 422 Textbook, 8n1, 13, 32, 46–51 Theatre, 157 Third World, 6 Threat, 76, 81, 111, 132, 138, 138n16, 170, 171n38, 202, 222, 223, 224n2, 225, 302, 321, 343, 364, 385, 417, 419 Throne, 71, 72, 78, 94 Tigray (ethnic group), 150n4, 406–408, 414, 416, 420–422, 426 Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) (political party), 151,

 INDEX 

172, 173, 173n41, 409, 416, 417, 420, 426 Title, 66, 70, 103, 143, 160, 167, 300, 308, 351n3, 389n15 holders, 15, 155, 157, 160, 188, 302 Tolerance, 50 religious, 45 Tonga (ethnic group), 88n5 Topnaar (ethnic group), see Khoekhoen (ethnic group) Tourism, 32, 47, 72, 228–231, 235, 239, 270 Township, 18, 381, 390, 391, 393, 397 Trade arms, 18, 358, 361, 363 ivory, 49 slave, 13, 29–55 weapons, 361 Trader, 13, 34–36, 45–47, 49, 50, 55, 324, 325, 365 Tradition ancestral, 74 democratic, 148 invention of, 76, 81, 187, 246, 322, 327, 338 local, 6, 9, 153n13 Marxist-Leninist, 152 oral, 44–47, 50, 51, 68, 71 political, 72, 75 precolonial, 64, 76 rebirth of, 151–154 Traditionalism, 147 neo-, 53, 220 Training, 231, 253, 355, 356, 364, 365, 388, 391, 418, 419 Transformation, 10, 15, 35, 65, 88, 110, 112, 122, 124, 125, 127, 130, 131n10, 343, 376, 414–423 Transgression, 100, 138 Translation, 104n16, 122, 132, 134

457

Transparency, 16, 237, 284, 407 Transport, 163, 164, 233, 353n5 Tree, 69, 70, 72, 161, 164, 172, 172n41, 173, 304–306 holy, 164 Tribalism, 6, 9, 15, 147, 384 Tribalization, 125 Tribe, 6, 7, 43, 51, 55, 125, 226 Tribulation, 70 Trust, 18, 129, 206, 229, 279, 335, 400, 408, 410, 422, 425 Truth, 2, 4, 8, 18, 142, 186, 320, 386, 387n12, 393n20, 396 Tumbuka (ethnic group), 88n5, 95n12 Turkana (ethnic group), 352, 353, 354n6, 355, 357, 359–361, 363–367, 366n13, 369, 370 Turmoil, 147–176, 247, 417, 425 Tusi (ethnic group), 71 Tutu, Desmond, 396 Twins, 73 Tyranny, 149 U Uganda, 19, 351, 358, 405 Ujamaa, 54, 78 Uncertainty, 10, 18, 143, 326, 405–407, 409 Unemployment, 170, 192, 209 UNESCO, see United Nations Uniform, 63, 77, 110, 368, 422 Union, 147, 203n20, 376 National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW), 196, 203n20 trade, 189, 203, 203n20, 204 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 127 United Democratic Front (political party) (UDF), 89–91, 96

458 

INDEX

United Kingdom (UK), 93, 395 United Nations (UN) U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 163, 166, 171n38, 261 U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 414, 417–420, 425 United States (US), 105, 166, 172, 383, 409, 418, 425 Unity, 30, 31, 47, 52–55, 78, 171, 273, 327n3, 377, 383 University, 43, 44, 203 Unrest, 124n5, 171 Upheaval, 87, 170, 175, 258 Uprising, 87n1, 148, 170, 220, 231–238, 297, 297n2 Urbanization, 6 Utopia, 149–150 V Value chain, 362, 370 cultural, 311n5, 312 democratic, 148 economic, 17, 307 Van Binsbergen, Wim, 66, 77 Vansina, Jan, 65, 66, 74 Vaughan, Olufemi, 3, 129 Vereenigte Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), 375, 375n1 Verwoerd, Hendrik (politician), 18, 376–378, 381–387, 387n12, 396 Verwoerdism, 375–400 Victim, 50, 71, 358, 384, 390, 391 Vigilantism, 332 Village, 10, 31, 66, 73–75, 79, 80, 89, 94, 95, 97–100, 135–137, 156, 185, 190, 191, 195–197, 197n10, 205, 249, 258, 319,

329–338, 340, 341, 343, 352, 360–363, 367, 368, 370, 412 Violence gender based, 419 informalization of, 348, 369, 370 instruments of, 352, 357, 362 Virtue, 108, 133, 143, 149, 222, 301 Visibility, 18, 375–400 Visualization, 378, 391 Volunteer, 17, 347, 348, 353, 356, 367, 368, 370 Vorster, John B. (politician), 377 Vote, 9, 71, 94n11, 153, 167, 210, 366, 370 W War First World, 70 on poverty, 198, 207 prisoners of, 151, 424 Warfare, 81, 87, 125, 170 Warlord, 9, 87 Warrior, 89n5, 170n35, 332, 336, 351n3, 356, 366, 368 Wealth, 98, 191 Weapon, 17, 36, 348–350, 357, 358, 361, 368, 369 of the weak, 349 Weber, Max, 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 20, 65, 103–111, 140, 187, 222, 224, 321, 322 Welfare, 195, 256, 367 social, 11, 15, 185–212 Well-being, 64, 81, 136, 155, 226, 312, 416 Williams, J., Michael, 7, 21, 110, 188, 189, 211, 212, 220, 238, 250, 251, 380, 398 Witchcraft, 1, 11, 71, 73, 89, 95–98, 105, 106 Witchdoctor, 91

 INDEX 

World Bank, 91, 195 Worldview, 17, 52, 327, 340 Y Yao (ethnic group), 88, 89n5, 94, 95n12, 97, 98, 100, 101n15, 102 Z Zairization, 53 Zambia, 13, 53, 66, 77–82, 268

Zande (ethnic group), 74, 75 Zanzibar, 31, 34–36, 39, 43, 46, 48–50 Zimbabwe, 16, 19, 237, 268, 293–314 Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) (political party), 298 Zone, 36, 66, 125, 323, 408 tribal, 124, 125, 127 Zulu (ethnic group), 89n5

459