Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa

2. “The Binding Together of the People”: The Historical Development of the Chieftaincy and the Principle of Unity

“the binding together of the people” | 39 “The Binding Together of the People” The Historical Development of the Chieftaincy and the Principle of Unity “[T]raditional” institutions such as chiefship need[] to be cleans[ed] . . . of all the undemocratic attributes that were imparted to it both by colonialism and apartheid. —Skweyiya 1993: 1 [Before colonialism] political leadership was personal. . . . A chief (and even the king) was supposed to deal with his people himself and should not altogether delegate this duty. Chiefs and indunas knew most of their subjects, with their relationships and ancestry. . . . The Zulu sum this up by saying “the people respect their chief, but the chief ought to respect his people.” —Gluckman 1940a: 44 InthecurrentdebatesinSouthAfricaconcerningthechieftaincy , the past is prologue, to the extent that the positions that many politicians, journalists, and academics take on whether the chieftaincy should exist in post-apartheid South Africa are based on their interpretation of chieftaincy-societal and chieftaincy-state relations in the past. This is why the debates over the chieftaincy often allude to how the chieftaincy governed before colonialism and how these governing norms and practices were altered during apartheid. Numerous scholars argue that pre-colonial norms and values might continue to influence present-day politics (Schatzberg 2001; Herbst 2000; Heywood 1998; Schaffer 1998; Geschiere 1997; Vansina 1990; Laitin 1986). At the same time, while scholars often have an “intuition that African politics must have deep continuities,” there is also the reality that colonial regimes sought to alter pre-colonial norms and institutions (Herbst 2000: 29). In this way, both the continuities with and the changes from the past relate to the claims that chiefs currently use to maintain legitimacy. First, I begin to develop what I refer to as “idea of the chieftaincy” as a central cultural and institutional aspect of local political life. Contrary two 40 | chieftaincy, the state, and democracy to what some studies contend, communities oftentimes respect the “idea of the chieftaincy” more than particular individual officeholders.1 The norms, values, ideas, and symbols embedded in the chieftaincy provide the nexus point where more general understandings of power, fairness, representation, and justice are continually defined and debated. In the end, the “idea of the chieftaincy” operates as a prism through which many people define and interpret present-day political transformation in South Africa. Second, I explore the ways in which particular “traditions” associated with the chieftaincy have been malleable and fluid over time, even when confronted with colonial and apartheid regimes that sought to freeze notions of custom (Hobsbawm 1983; Ranger 1983). Similar to Vansina, I think it is more useful to conceptualize “traditions” as processes, which must continually change to remain salient, than to assume “traditions” are fixed practices or ideas (1990: 258). To understand these processes, I argue that we must examine how chieftaincies and their communities reconciled the gap between preexisting political traditions (i.e., indigenous rules, processes, and ideologies) and official state rules concerning “tradition” (i.e., “customary law”). The colonial and apartheid governments manipulated certain aspects of tradition—especially relating to indigenous political ideology—to facilitate their authority. In many cases, however, studies addressing the political salience of tradition fail to examine why some political norms, ideas, values, and symbols resonate with people while others do not (Hamilton 1998; Young 1993a; Fields 1985). In other words, to what extent is the state actually borrowing particular norms and symbols rather than inventing them? With respect to chieftaincy-societal relations, the questions are even more specific: what are the acceptable boundaries of political action and debate, who makes or remakes these boundaries, what are the available remedies if one crosses these boundaries , and how did indirect rule and apartheid affect these boundaries? To answer these questions requires an understanding of the pre-colonial political traditions and how these have continued to develop over time as these traditions “act as a touchstone for proposed innovations, whether from within or from without” (Vansina 1990: 259). The Ideological and Political Imperatives of “Unity” The concept of unity, or in Zulu, simunye (we are one), is the dominant cultural and political theme structuring chieftaincy-societal relations in “the binding together of the people” | 41 KwaZulu-Natal.2 Broadly speaking, political decisions must appear to achieve or maintain unity if they are to be “acceptable” or “thinkable” to the community at large. Over time, this idea not only justified the centralization of power, but it also helped to...