South Africa

Journal of Contemporary African Studies Vol. 27, No.
2, April 2009, 201223
Deliberative democracy and the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa: A case of despotic domination or democratic deliberation?
Edward LiPumaa* and Thomas A. Koelbleb
a Anthropology Department, University of Miami; bGraduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, South Africa
A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of deliberative democracy. This debate is fanned by the claims of traditional leaders that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a superior process for the African continent as it evolves from pre-colonial tradition, but that it represents a form of democracy that is more authentic than the Western version. Proponents suggest that traditional ways of deliberation are making a come-back because imported Western models of democracy that focus on the state and state institutions miss the fact that in African societies state institutions are often seen as illegitimate or simply absent from peoples daily lives. In other words, traditional leadership structures are more appropriate to African contexts than their Western rivals. Critics suggest that traditional leaders, far from being authentic democrats, are power-hungry patriarchs and authoritarians attempting to both re-invent their political, social and economic power (frequently acquired under colonial and apartheid rule) and re-assert their control over locallevel resources at the expense of the larger community. In this view, the concept of deliberative democracy is being misused as a legitimating device for a politics of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is the opposite of the meaning of the term in the European and US sense. This article attempts to contextualise this debate and show how the efforts by traditional leaders to capture an intermediary position between rural populations and the state is fraught with conflicts and contradictions when it comes to forming a democratic state and society in post-apartheid South Africa. Keywords: deliberative democracy; democratic theory; traditional leadership; emerging democracies; post-colony; emerging markets
Traditional leadership: Deliberative democracy or autocracy? This article discusses whether traditional leadership in South Africa constitutes a potentially indigenous form of participatory deliberative democracy as Nelson Mandela and several chiefs in southern Africa claim (Mandela 1994, 614), or whether it represents a lingering species of despotic domination, as its detractors argue (Mamdani 1996, 3761). The question is critical both theoretically and substantively because the South African electorate is being asked to assess the claims by traditional leaders to both their popular legitimacy and hereditary rule (Oomen 2005, 102). This engages, by extension, the issue of what kind of democracy South Africa should have. At stake is whether some realisations of democratic grassroots deliberation as practised in rural village councils by mainstream South African
*Corresponding author. Email: elipuma@comcast.net
ISSN 0258-9001 print/ISSN 1469-9397 online # 2009 The Institute of Social and Economic Research DOI: 10.1080/02589000902867287 http://www.informaworld.com
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E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble
traditional leaders are compatible with the philosophical and analytical literature on deliberative democracy. By compatible, we mean that these local South African realisations bear a clear family resemblance to the principles of deliberative democracy as articulated not simply in a foreign Euro-American literature, but a literature that advocates of traditional leadership cite as the Euro-American (idealised) version of what they have long practised. Their ontological claim is that two distinct but parallel traditions of deliberative democracy, one indigenously African, the other Euro-American, have now become historically entwined in ways that, in the post-apartheid/colonial South African context, compel some rapprochement (Nash 2002, 250). The corresponding political claim is that South Africa, and by extension a plethora of other African nations (such as Botswana, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria), can only be truly popularly democratic if they are willing to valorise and incorporate their own self-created traditions of deliberative democracy. This singular idealised version cannot help but rub up against the multiple local realisations of traditional leadership. So, while some traditional leaders are seeking to cast themselves as intrinsically democratic, there are more than a few who are overtly authoritarian (Ntsebeza 2005, 22940; Van Kessel and Oomen 1997, 5813). The implicit question is that of the sign versus the symptom: whether the autocratic bordering on despotic tendencies of some traditional leaders are simply a sign that they, like corrupt politicians in even the most democratic democracies, have besmirched and betrayed their office, or whether such anti-democratic practices are symptoms of the design features of traditional leadership as an institution. The difference is politically important: the first suggests that more vigorous oversight and accountability should resolve the problem, whereas the second implies that the institution is itself so fundamentally undemocratic that the only remedy is to quarantine or transform it. The complementary question which has not been adequately stressed in the national debate is whether there exists common ground between particular cases of traditional leadership and interpretations of deliberative democracy, so as to allow for a hybrid institution adequate for the present conditions in South Africa. Inherent in these questions are two determinations about the character of traditional leadership. The first is that while traditional leadership gains legitimacy by rooting itself in African tradition, and arguing that this basis is a source of strength, it is also known historically that the character of the leadership has metamorphosed in response to changing political landscapes, including those that predate colonialism (Crais 2002, 14559). While this certainly does not prove that the institution can successfully adapt to the mandates of representation and accountability that underpin liberal democracy, it does indicate that the institution has already exhibited the capacity to evolve its behaviours internally (Thornton 2002, 1). Indeed, one of the legitimising arguments put forward by traditional leaders is that the imposition of colonialism and its apartheid successor are what perverted the institution away from its authentically democratic (pan)African roots into a more autocratic direction.1 From this perspective, incorporating traditional leadership into a democratic model would allow it to reassert its genuine identity (Nash 2002, 249). The second determination is the recognition that one of the characteristics of traditional leadership is that it is now, and has historically been, deeply decentralised and thus open to local interpretation in its conception and institutionalisation (Robins and Van der Waal 2007, 7). The analytical but also
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political question is whether it is possible to assimilate all of these variegated instances of traditional leadership into a self-acknowledged social typology. What this means is that, for chiefs, a principal decision, and the site of considerable contestation, is which local interpretation of chiefdomship to canonise as the national tradition in the context of South Africas liberal constitutional democracy. Keenly aware of this problem, political leaders, such as Mandela, have sought to foreground a democratically infused model of chiefly leadership as the traditional one that is also actualized often enough to constitute a genuine type. In addition, the Congress of Traditional Leaders in South Africa (CONTRALESA) strategy has been to idealise the more democratic versions of traditional leadership and to then represent these kinds as authentically African. This distillation of local traditions toward a more singularly democratic model allows traditional leaders to acknowledge that some chiefs may abuse their authority, but then to counterargue that the problem lies with the individual office holder rather than the office.2 On this score we believe that the practices of traditional leaders in South Africa show that, as presently constituted, the institution is incommensurable with the idealised Euro-American conception of deliberative democracy, at least as it appears in interpretations set out by Iris Marion Young (2000), Seyla Benhabib (1996, 2002), and others within that tradition. The first part of our analysis delves into the analytical literature on deliberative democracy by looking at key excerpts from Youngs important Inclusion and Democracy (2000).3 We take this text (which both encapsulates and reformulates her earlier work) as our point of departure because its root argument about the essential criteria for deliberative democracy has become central to the Euro-American debate on its fundamental character. The second part of the article deals with the reinvention of traditional leadership in South Africa. Building on Mandelas arguments concerning an African version of deliberative democracy, one of the defining claims is that traditional leadership inherently that is, at a time-honoured institutional level embodies the essential character of deliberative democracy. The third section of the article assesses the empirical practices of traditional leaders in the council decision-making process, based on participant observation fieldwork conducted in various regions of South Africa. In sum our objective is to assess the complicated claim that chiefly leadership within the framework of village council decision-making constitutes an indigenous form of deliberative democracy practised widely in southern Africa. The concept of deliberative democracy in Euro-American political theory In order to consider the political utility of the notion of deliberative democracy rather than the enormous analytical and theoretical literature that has mushroomed around it, we focus our discussion by foregrounding the work of deliberative democracys arguably most influential proponent, Iris Marion Young, who represents the genre in a particularly impressive manner, is paradigmatic in the tradition, and is universally recognised as a leading scholar in the field. Any assessment of whether the institution of traditional leadership is compatible with the aims of deliberative democracy depends on how we define the term. Young, in concert with other theorists, looks mainly at how political practice is done (as opposed, for example, to the structural conditions of its unfolding). She submits that a policy decision is made in a genuinely deliberatively democratic manner only if the
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decision-making practice satisfies a critical ensemble of normative benchmarks or thresholds. Of these, four aspects of the process are accorded special weighting and are generally accepted as the criteria for deliberative democracy. A well deliberated decision must include all those affected by the decision. They must be viable political players in both discussion and decision-making. Every participant has to be appreciated and treated as politically equal to every other; at least for the purposes of conversation, the process must overstep existing forms of hierarchisation. It must also take place in a framework and with the expectation of reasonableness, participants have to keep an open mind on the outcome rather than clinging to preconceived notions of what should happen. Lastly, the process has to be public and one in which participants hold each other equally accountable (Young 2000, 23-5). As Seyla Benhabib observes, the basis of legitimacy in democracy derives from the presumption that the institutions that claim obligatory power do so because their decisions remain open to appropriate processes of public deliberation by free and equal citizens (Benhabib 2002, 1056). A prerequisite is that participants are first led to bracket, for the purposes of discussion, the social and economic conditions that permit these processes to take place. The creation and inscription of this disposition is itself the aim and affect of the deliberative democratic process. Young recognises that there is a kind of social circularity to the thesis due to the dialectical relationship between structure and agency: just societies are likely to produce just conditions under which deliberation between equals in a reasonable and inclusive fashion can take place. But what of societies in which structural inequalities whether social, economic, political, religious, or in some combination prevail and where injustice and inequality have long defined the exercise of agency? What of those political contexts, as exemplified by South Africa, in which structural inequalities are widely entrenched and expectations of injustice and inequality are deeply embedded in the dispositions of agents? Even a preliminary survey of complex societies, including precolonial and precapitalist social formations such as eighteenth-century Zulu and Yoruba societies, indicates that hierarchisation has been prevalent (Johnson 2006; Morris and Buthelezi 1999). Young responds by suggesting that deliberative democracy consists less in perfectly satisfying the entire set of normative criteria than in explicitly and self-reflexively pursuing those criteria, continually progressing toward true deliberative democracy. She writes:
Proponents of the application of a model of deliberative democracy to actual political processes in imperfect democracies with injustices suggest that the more that public life and political decision-making motivate political actors to justify their claims and actions and be accountable to their fellow citizens, the more the arbitrariness of greed, naked power, or the cynical pursuit of self-interest can be exposed and limited (Young 2000, 35).
While there may be disagreements as to whether (and to what degree) economic inequality is just or not, there is a recognition that the ability of the socially, economically or politically powerful to influence policy must be regulated, limited and in some instances outlawed. And to do so, democracies have adopted a variety of mechanisms to discourage corruption, influence peddling, unbridled lobbying, and so forth to restrain this use of power (Young 2000, 36). Young, on these grounds, emphasises the construction of institutional and procedural checks and balances to help avoid domination by the more powerful over the less powerful. In effect, it is
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important to immunise decision-making bodies (such as a village council) from those external sources of distortion that would, if left unchecked, deform or altogether derail the deliberative process. Here she is in line with other democratic theorists such as Carol Pateman (1985), C.B. McPherson (1977) and Nicos Poulantzas (1980) who suggested various mechanisms to bring about increased equality (such as publicly provided crches so that women could participate in deliberations) in highly complex societies. She also upholds a classic tradition in conventional political science that advocates the introduction of checks and balances at various levels of government to help bring about democratic consensus (Dahl 1971; Lijphart 1999). In an illuminating passage on the issue of assuming face-to-face discussion, Young argues that too many theorists of deliberative democracy only consider what Habermas has referred to as a centered image of democracy in which there exists one privileged forum where participants meet to discuss issues (Young 2000, 45). She cites numerous authors who view the site of deliberation in a town council, co-operative societies, and other forms of community or neighbourhood meetings. Young, (and again she is not the sole advocate of this position, as the work of Alain Touraine illustrates), argues that it is possible to imagine a discussion-based democracy in a mass society one of strangers and that this is an imperative if deliberative democracy is to be compatible with contemporary global trends (Touraine 2000, 156 264). For her, the ideal situation is one in which civil society organisations take a leadership role in interacting with a variety of state institutions and communication flows between numerous centres. These civil society organisations are based on voluntary self-ascription within an egalitarian framework. People thus have the right to join or leave an association as they choose, and no one is prevented from participating on the basis of their ethnic or tribal identity, religion, or heredity. There are three socio-structural assumptions embodied in Youngs perspective (and these resonate in Touraines approach to multicultural and deliberative democracy as well) that are particularly relevant to the South African context. The first is that civil society and political society are isomorphic, because every citizen is per-force a member of civil society. The premise is that citizens are the stakeholders of record, and that every adult citizen possesses the ability that is to say, the requisite capital and the disposition to participate in civil society. The second notion is that higher orders of political organisation subsume lower ones: in this view localism and community autonomy are not hallmarks of deliberative democracy. The presupposition here which is no more than a reflection of EuroAmerican realities is that the national state has considerable capillary power so that civil society associations can enhance the welfare of the local communities by interacting with state institutions. The third assumption is that citizens and governing elite desire to group together the existing forms of ethnic, heredity, gender, and religious identities for the sake of a more egalitarian and deliberative democracy (Valadez 2001). The supposition is that citizens and governing elite embrace this multicultural pluralist framework as the best arrangement for advancing a notion of democracy as a co-operative enterprise among free and equal citizens (Touraine 2000, 262). The crux in the South African context is to what extent the institution and practices of traditional leaders approximate the normative model set out by theorists of deliberative democracy, exemplified in the work of Iris Marion Young. This process of approximation is doubly constituted: at the level of performative criteria,
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such as those of inclusion and reasonableness, and more deeply, at the level of social presuppositions about, for example, the relationship between the state and civil society that grounds the prospects for actualising a genuinely deliberative democracy. What would a Youngian deliberative democracy look like at the level of traditional leadership and village level decision-making? To return to our opening statement, the process would need to be inclusive rather than exclusive; decisions would have to be based on political equality rather than hierarchical relationships; the deliberation would have to take place in a context of openness of ideas and reasonableness that precludes preconceived ideas and notions of what should happen; and participants would be able to hold one another accountable, individually and through the institutions of the state, for what has been said and what is to be done. Moreover, the processes of deliberation would have to take place in a context of an activist state able to reward participation in deliberation as well as enforce accountability and a situation where all the members of the polity are in one way or another part of an active civil society. The reinvention of traditional leadership in post-apartheid South Africa Along with several other authors, we have produced analyses of the re-emergence or re-invention of traditional leadership in South Africa and elsewhere (LiPuma and Koelble 2005; Ntsebeza 1999, 2005; Claassens 2001). The essence of the argument is that South Africa crafted a democratic dispensation with the firm intention of rooting out one of the vestiges of colonialism and apartheid - the power and privilege of traditional leaders in the hinterlands (mostly former bantustans) of the country but has since retracted from this oppositional politics to one bordering on collusion and compromise with these rural power-holders (Thornton 2002; Oomen 2005). The research puzzle we sought to answer was this - why would the democratically elected political authorities in South Africa seek to re-establish a working relationship with supporting institutions of the apartheid regime? Indeed, there is now clear evidence that the champions of the new democratic dispensation are attempting to reintegrate traditional leaders into the political system, in the process awarding them the political leverage to re-establish their political, cultural and social control over rural populations (Cousins 2000). But this does not, of course, explain why a liberal government, with one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, should be inclined to support traditional leaders. The explanation is complex and involves consideration of the global position of the post-apartheid regime and the local constraints placed upon liberation (LiPuma and Koelble 2005). The constraints faced by the progressive forces in the government are the effect of socio-economic and cultural structures that are not easily displaced or removed without a commitment of scarce resources to encourage socio-economic and cultural change in precisely those remote areas least likely to be drivers of economic growth. Moreover, the traditional leaders have artfully reinvented themselves in the interim and have discovered a variety of methods to reclaim their authority in the absence of a forceful state presence.4 This involves ideological, cultural and economic elements that combine in a potent mix that makes them increasingly invulnerable to demands for their abdication of power (Oomen 2005, 87122). Especially their insistence that they and the village council system of governance are in fact an African version of the Euro-American ideal of direct democracy and deliberation is protective
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armour in their defence against institutional democrats who would like to see locally elected democratic governments take their place (Ntsebeza 2005, 27784). Further, the argument that traditional leaders are basically democratic can serves two masters. It fits the claim by traditional leaders that their institution is compatible with a liberal democratic model, while for the centrist ANC-run government, it makes it appear that it is only allowing an alternative democratic model to re-emerge in the hinterlands, as opposed to one that the ANCs own progressive wing characterises as an authoritarian holdover from colonialism and apartheid. In order to understand the political role that traditional leaders are aiming to assume, we must address the origins and the history of the concept as well as of the individuals involved. While a case can be made, and CONTRALESA advances that case, that traditional leaders preceded colonial rule, there is much socio-historical and anthropological evidence to suggest that the current forms and functions of the institution are based on their involvement in, and evolution under, colonial rule (Mamdani 1996; Werbner and Ranger 1996). Historical and anthropological studies indicate that a multitude of political forms of governance existed across Africa prior to colonisation, ranging from centralised kingdoms to federated empires to loosely conjugated kinship or descent groups (Vesina 1990). A not uncommon political form in southern Africa has been that of communities, bound together by kinship relationships to establish a community leader, often supported by a group of elders who would counsel this individual (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). The structure of political governance had a large number of iterations, yet it was not uncommon for unpopular leaders to be deserted by their community, leaving them isolated and abandoned (Durham 1999). While communal leaders were selected on the basis of descent, they were seldom awarded a hereditary title, nor was their rule absolute the community could easily vote with its feet, especially since relations and boundaries with neighbouring groups were not geographically fixed and were, in kinship terms, open and fluid. There are several important studies of the impact that colonisation had on these political forms (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997; Crais 2002; Nstebeza, 2005; Werbner and Ranger 1996). Europeans, eager to establish fixed borders and boundaries (on the model of the nation-state), even more eager to establish a political leadership to represent the populace and serve as an intermediary between the colonial state and that community, and most eager to bring about a system of divide and rule, elevated certain chosen individuals to the position of chief. As colonial rule deepened and the advantages and disadvantages of being aligned to the colonial authorities became obvious, the struggle over access to resources provided communities with unenviable choices (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 198210). Colonial administrations encouraged the appointment of local dignitaries and power-holders with whom they would bargain and communicate and established borders to distinguish the hitherto border-fluid territories of the affected kinship groups. In turn, the chosen leaders would adopt claims to hereditary title, very much along the lines of the European aristocracy, and would bolster their claims to legitimacy with resources that only they could access in their negotiations with the colonial powers. The role of traditional leaders in South Africa, established under British colonial rule, was further deepened and rendered problematic by the apartheid regime. In an effort to concretise the apartheid dream of separate development, the apartheid regime created homelands (also known as bantustans) in which traditional leaders
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of various stripes and colours were given carte blanche to administer these territories (Crais 2002, 159). The historian Clifton Crais argues that the cyclone of legislation in the 1940s and 1950s destroyed any semblance of traditional society in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere in the country by bringing about a collapse of traditional authority structures, economic support and social understandings (Crais 2002, 145). Venda, the Transkei, Ciskei, KwaZulu and several other regions deemed to be outside South Africa were provided with independence, meaning that they were not administered by the South African state and were left to the devices of homelands administrations run by kings, chiefs and by their representatives in the communities, the headmen and councillors (Ntsebeza 2005, 175206). While local images vary widely, the general picture is remarkably similar across the former homelands - kings and chiefs forged their compromise with the apartheid authorities and became, in essence, the administrators of separate development, often also bearing the brunt of resentment by the population. Some did this with greater enthusiasm than others, but the fact remains that the apartheid state abrogated its responsibilities for enormous swathes of the country and population through this policy of segregation and that the traditional leaders were a necessary cog in this machinery of injustice. Traditional leaders, including kings, who did not co-operate with the system were quickly and quietly removed from positions of power and replaced with more acquiescent individuals (Lodge 1983). Traditional leaders occupied the same political space in the rural hinterland as the township councillors took in the urban townships; they both administered apartheid rules and laws, often in situations where they went unsupervised and could use these rules and laws for their own benefit. Traditional leaders main source of income, for instance, was from issuing travel and other documents to aspiring migrant workers (Van Kessel and Oomen 1997, 5667). In return for the issuance of such vital documentation, chiefs would not only receive monetary compensation but services in kind. It is then not surprising that traditional leadership held low currency in the liberation movement and that an effort was made by the ANC-led opposition to encourage traditional leaders to abandon their association with the apartheid regime and join with the liberation movement (Ntsebeza 2005, 25866). For this reason the Congress for Traditional Leaders in South Africa was formed in the mid-1980s and it is this association that is now at the forefront of the re-invention and re-emergence of traditional leadership.5 CONTRALESA was, at its inception, a small interest group within the larger liberation movement, though it rapidly evolved into an umbrella organisation for the various and often fractious traditional leadership around the country. Its association with the ANC made it a convenient cover for former apartheid collaborators (Van Kessel 1993, 613). From the start, CONTRALESA articulated an Africanist political ideology that advocated the return of African values as a means of restoring pride and dignity. In particular, the idea that black South Africans needed to free themselves of colonial and Eurocentric ideologies is prevalent in the organisation, and it is here that the notion of a genuinely African democracy has found its most interesting and well-articulated expression. Neither the state nor the populace should hold traditional leaders responsible for the sins of apartheid, or so the argument goes, because they were equally victims of its oppression and co-operated with the regime only because they were presented with few alternatives.6 Van Kessel also points out that the chiefs were viewed by the ANC as a counterweight to the rebellious youth
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which had formed the backbone of the anti-apartheid rebellion in the rural areas of the Northern Transvaal (Van Kessel 1993, 612). In this interpretation, traditional leaders, along with traditional healers, are guardians and custodians of African values and culture and are able to redefine African moral and political values on behalf of and with the help of their communities. One of the more potent and visible movements to promote the renewal of African values is the Moral Regeneration Movement (MRG) led by the ex-Deputy President Jacob Zuma. While the movement is associated with the ANC through Zumas leadership role, it is also perfectly situated to appeal to all rural power-holders across the country. It is noteworthy that the MRG is highly active in KwaZulu-Natal where it co-operates with the Inkatha Freedom Party and provides support for the Zulu chiefs. The MRG and CONTRALESA argue that only a return to true African values will bring about a reduction of violence and criminality, and the return to South Africa of its indigenous morality (Zuma 2004). These groups imagine African political morality to be critically different from Euro-American morality, which, in their view, is too preoccupied with the concept of individual rights and responsibilities to accord social considerations their rightful place; in those terms, the EuroAmerican view imagines the social as built up entirely from the amalgamation of individuals, so the interests of the community are no more than the sum of the interests of its membership. To put the matter boldly, MRG and CONTRALESA argue that African morality is based on the concept of ubuntu, whose grounding principles are humanity, unity, and collectivity. In this view, individual interests should be subordinated to collective ones; individual preferences cannot be isolated from community issues and preferences; and the encapsulating moral economy is at once normative and prescriptive (Marx 2002, 645). The consequence (as MRG and CONTRALESA see it) is that the colonial history that led to the wholesale adoption of a Euro-American morality has led, in turn, to the breakdown of the machinery of justice as well as breakdown in peoples sense of law and order and respect for their community. The problem is that this take on Western morality and legality does not resonate with the African populations vision and understanding of what justice is and what society should look like.7 However, one of the outstanding places in which these prototypical African values are still alive and well is, so CONTRALESA argues, in the local rural village councils where collective decisions are taken by consensus and not by voting. Traditional leaders oversee this time-honored way to collective decision-making and therefore embody positive African moral values.8 What then are these time-honoured practices of the village council system of deliberation? What is the nature of African democracy that the leaders of CONTRALESA wish to adopt and promote? Traditional leaders, spearheaded by CONTRALESA, agitated unsuccessfully during the constitutional negotiations to have their role codified in the constitution and in subsequent legislation dealing with local government. They were unsuccessful in doing so as their popularity in the liberation movement was low, but since then, they have been able, little by little, to influence the legislation on local governance. Particularly the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act, the Municipal Structures Act, and the Communal Land Rights Act all of which preoccupy themselves with the structure of local governance have provided traditional leaders with increasing power, both in representation and in actual policy implementation that far exceed the role given to them in the constitution (Ntsebeza 2005, 27789).
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The ideological position the proponents have adopted, at least in dealing with government legislation and their official rhetoric, is that village level decision-making is a form of direct deliberative democracy. This line is propagated in position papers and official policy statements, but is perhaps best captured in a series of comments on the White Paper on Traditional Leadership and Governance which preceded its promulgation. In discussing the proposed legislation, the traditional leaders made several telling points:
South Africa should not emulate the failures of the rest of Africa but should exhibit the necessary far-sighted statesmanship that will allow us to demonstrate to Africa and the rest of the world that we are proud of our African heritage and systems of governance. This can be done by developing a unique blend of true African democracy [i.e. nonconfrontational politics and issue-based direct democracy] together with the system we have borrowed from the Europeans. In a blended system, traditional authorities would function as the third tier of government. (Comments on the White Paper).
CONTRALESA would like to see the introduction of traditional leadership as the lowest level of government, rather than a system of elected councillors based in the municipalities. The main justification for this is put thus:
The White Paper makes the consistent assumption that democracy has only one meaning, that of representative democracy in which people vote for representatives who then decide on all matters. However, direct democracy is a major alternative system. The African tribal tradition which requires decisions to be made on a consensus basis by the people with the traditional leader acting as a facilitator exemplifies such a system. (Comments on the White Paper).
While the traditional leaders were not able to stop the introduction of municipal governance in the rural areas, the government adopted what they viewed as a compromise with the chiefs (Oomen 2005, 12364). Further acts of governance strengthened the legal position of the traditional leaders in terms of land allocation and communal land rights through the Communal Land Rights Act. In rural areas, the rules and regulations for private ownership have been partially suspended to allow communal land-holding to occur, and these lands have been left in the hands of the traditional authorities (Ntsebeza 2005, 288). In other words, in these areas the traditional leaders still hold the power to allocate land to individuals and families who have no other claim to the land other than the word of the chief and his council. For such individuals, it is virtually impossible to apply to a bank for a loan to improve agricultural production and for this reason the legislation emphasises the role that traditional leaders ought to take in the development of their communities. In fact, the traditional leaders are viewed, from a legislative point of view, as the engine of economic development in those areas, as much as the municipalities and elected councillors. The virtues of African local-level or village-level democracy are praised not only by CONTRALESA but by politically powerful icons such as Nelson Mandela. In his autobiography, Mandela, recalling his childhood experiences at the Thembu Great Place at Mquekezweni, writes:
[D]emocracy meant that all men were to be heard, and a decision was taken together as a people. Majority rule was a foreign concept. A minority could not be crushed by a majority. Only at the end of the meeting, as the sun was setting, would the regent speak. His purpose was to sum up what had been said and form some consensus among the
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diverse opinions. But no conclusion was forced on people who disagreed. If no agreement was reached, another meeting would be held (Mandela 1994, 610).
Mandelas praise for the system of village level decision-making in the kgotla, currently practised in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and other southern African states, resonates with those who would like to see the resurrection of a more indigenous democratic model and are thus seeking to reshape that model to suit modern conditions. This is particularly the case for gender issues. Pathekile Holomisa, the current president of CONTRALESA, was at pains during our interview with him to dispel the notion that chiefs must be male and that a traditional system treats women as second-class citizens a position he reiterated in subsequent newspaper interviews (Holomisa 2003). Yet, our interviews with other chiefs - including some leading lights in the ANC revealed a somewhat more qualified picture. As one chief put it: Women in leadership have no role to play, women play no leadership role on land; let me put it this way by birth female have no control over male.9 The political project of trying to revive traditional leadership and with that the re-establishment of limited sovereignty has given birth to two polar positions. These two positions, in turn, serve to bracket a range of intermediary stances in what is a fluid political space. At one pole, we find a group of modernists, many of whom have college and post-graduate degrees. Their aim is to transform an institution whose legitimacy stems from its assertion of deep historical roots in what is, from a historical perspective, an imagined pre-colonial past. Such modernists, including Mandela and Pathekile Holomisa, are busy democratising the institution to make it more compatible with the requirements of a liberal, Euro-American constitution, no matter how inherently difficult this might be (Nash 2002). To do so, they are drawing upon legislation to fulfil the democratic norms by encouraging the installation of female chiefs, electing women into local councils, having youth representatives in village deliberations. They are seeking, in other words, to make traditional leadership more inclusive as a way of making the decision-making process more inclusive and egalitarian.10 The hope is that this realignment of power will lead in turn to reasonable debate as all of the stakeholders participate. This kind of village-level direct democracy is compatible with the political philosophical tradition that sees deliberative democracy as a face-to-face kind of system of consensus-seeking. Moreover, in this revisionist view, the national and regional governments in concert with local NGOs would monitor the chiefs to ensure accountability and transparency. If this revision of traditional leadership gains ground, then Mandelas vision of the consensus-based chief could become a reality. At the other pole, there are those chiefs who would like to reproduce hereditary leadership in much the same form, and along the same genealogical lines, as it evolved under apartheid, though they couch this as the preservation of tradition best suited for their people. These chiefs are caught between the real fear that liberal democracy will abolish their positions and powers unless they change, and their desire to reproduce an authoritarian social structure that materially and symbolically rewards them. Particularly in the former homelands, the vitality of their position lies in the fact that, as Clifton Crais points out, no institution has stepped in to replace traditional leaders creating a state of what he calls, ungovernance (Crais 2004, 19). Furthermore, the signal from central government is too weak to prevent it from instituting municipal governance or even enforcing Mandela-like modernised
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tradition. The lack of state capacity to enforce the adoption of new rules, of accountable and transparent governance in the hinterlands leaves the door open for another kind of modernised tradition namely the re-emergence of the colonialistic chief, the local dictator whose power is unchecked. And, of course, the field is wide open for all sorts of hybrids between these two models at the extreme ends of the range of possibilities. In a fascinating study of two communities, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, Van Wyk documents how chiefs have turned their tribes into corporations and have positioned themselves as chief executive officers of those corporations, which own parts of the St Lucia World Heritage Site (Van Wyk 2003). Several communities, including the #khomani San (Robins 2001) have pioneered this model in order to pursue land claims through the redistributive land programme currently in place. Village level decision-making, chiefly authority and their views on democracy In the winter of 2002 and throughout 20034, we conducted research by interview in several rural communities in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. In addition, we interviewed a number of chiefs and members of CONTRALESA in Cape Town. The ethnographic aim was to observe the behaviour of chiefs (amakhosi) and their councillors (who are called headmen or indunas) in village-level decision-making and record their relations to the newly elected local municipal councillors.11 In several cases, chiefs aligned with the ANC were in direct competition with chiefs loyal to the United Democratic Movement (UDM), a local rival of the ANC in the Eastern Cape, led by the former Transkei general and acknowledged dictator Bantu Holomisa. In the KwaZulu cases, there were several communities where the ANC found itself in immediate competition with the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). In other places, the ANC was the dominant political force in the community and the sole party of representation. While political tensions were certainly higher in the areas of direct UDM-ANC or ANC-IFP rivalry, political rivalries in the ANCcontrolled villages took the form of tensions between various local power-holders, usually all aligned with the ANC. On several occasions, we or our researchers and interpreters were accused of favouring the other group or faction and were viewed as suspicious by all rivals. While our research dealt only with some dozen chiefs (picked on the basis of availability and accessibility) and was concentrated in the Transkei and Northern KwaZulu, it corroborates the findings of various other researchers who have found similar situations and practices (Claassens 2001; Niehaus 2001; Ntsebeza 2005) in other parts of the country. In the winter of 2006, Koelble supervised follow-up work in a village in KwaZulu.12 Until the last elections, the village, situated in the Ingonyama Trust Lands that belong to the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini, had voted for the IFP. In the 2004 national elections, the village swung its vote to the ANC while its chief, headman and councillors were still associated with the IFP. In the municipal elections of 2006, the IFP also lost control over the local council and the induna of the village lost his seat on the council. Nevertheless, the chief and induna remain as the spokespersons for their communities and district when it comes to communication with the municipality. The tensions between local community and its leadership were obvious to the researcher from the beginning since his interpreter was affiliated to the ANC and was seen as suspicious by the induna and as a source of
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misinformation to the researcher from the very beginning of the project. Moreover, the researcher was accommodated in the interpreters family home, furthering the chiefs suspicion that the researcher would be biased against him and the IFP. In fact, the kinds of tensions we witnessed in this latest KwaZulu case were similar to the political tensions witnessed during our earlier research in the Eastern Cape. The villages we chose exhibited virtually no economic activity and enjoyed no monetary income apart from subsistence agriculture, social grants and remittances sent home by migrant workers. There were few or no electrical connections and only a few communal water taps. It became apparent during interviews that chiefs used the economic plight of their communities to blame the national government, arguing that the ANC had failed in its promises to the population. In the case of chiefs aligned to one of the opposition parties, a vote for the ANC amounted to a vote for a failing government. For those aligned to the ANC, a vote for the ANC was interpreted as a vote for a different kind of leadership within the ANC; one better attuned to the needs of the rural population and, in particular, to a reform of rural governance. Several chiefs argued that local government reform had brought about a situation of two bulls in a kraal, meaning that there was now confusion over where power and authority would lie at the local level.13 Several suggested that the introduction of local government had been a mistake and that traditional leaders were in a better position to administer localities than the local councillors. In this they echoed the position also advocated by CONTRALESA which had argued that in the rural areas, the third tier of government should be traditional leaders and not elected councillors as their methods of decision-making were compatible with democracy and certainly more in line with African culture. But what is this African culture these chiefs envisaged? A universal theme in the interviews with chiefs was the breakdown of the social order. While the following quote phrases the concerns in stark language, it is representative of what many of the chiefs had to say about the new democratic dispensation and the social costs of the transition:
My opinion is that we are moving to the dark side. As you see in these streets of Umtata, old men sleeping on the streets, young children are hungry at home and wives no longer obey their husbands. This never happened before. These people are dead really. If our enemy can come and organise all people living on the streets and give them food and instruct them to go to the community and do evil, I am telling you street people can go and do that. That is why people are killing each other like this. This is more than apartheid for this country; this is a Somalian solution.
The same chief expressed several concerns in this interview that again reflected themes we had picked up in other interviews:
Firstly, what is painful to us as chiefs is that there is a law that says a man has a right to marry another man. We are very unhappy about homosexuality. We even heard that women can divorce us if they are unhappy about the way we treat them. You just get a paper telling you that I divorce you and all that is democracy! Thirdly, there are childrens rights, but they are thugs and the law says we must not punish our children. Fourthly, there is a law that encourages killing which they call abortion and that is democracy!14
The chiefs lament represents a clarion call: the moral, social, economic, cultural and political breakdown cannot be halted by the ANC or the national government, but can only be brought about by a return to traditional value systems in which
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women and the young know their place in the social order - hardly a recipe for the kind of model that Young and other theorists of deliberative democracy envisage. One could, of course, argue that the values of these chiefs represented more widely held values in the rural population and although certainly discriminatory and exclusionary, they reflect how most people in such circumstances think about their world. Are chiefs then just harbingers of more widely held views and therefore in some sense only the democratic bearers of bad news from the hinterlands? Do they transmit the views of their communities to higher levels of governance and so act as delegates for these communities? In all cases, chiefs provided an important communication link between the community and the local municipality and, in some cases, the only linkage. The intermediary position of the chief provided some of them with the power to manipulate opinions both in the village and in the council. In one KwaZulu-Natal village, lack of development was blamed on an unwilling and uncaring government higher up; at the council level, chiefs suggested that their people did not desire projects that might change the nature of things in their district (Teng 2006). This duplicity was also obvious to members of the community who expressed their resignation about this situation to the researchers and their interpreters on several occasions.15 In several places, the lack of resources and planned action at municipal level was bemoaned as it forced these communities to turn to their chief because at least something might happen if the chief became active on a particular issue and mobilised support at the provincial level to improve a road or a school. The support for traditional leadership is not necessarily based on the fact that chiefs represent the values and views of their constituents well but that they are the bearers of custom, they represent a governing function in a context of limited governance by the state, and they are in a position to bring about some betterment in peoples lives, even if quite marginal (see also Oomen 2005, 1939). So what about the deliberative democratic values of village-level decision-making? Is there perhaps a democratic quality in the way these local-level institutions operate? The chiefs we interviewed all professed to follow traditional African ways of deliberation. The ideal, (if not idealised), version is that described by Mandela where the wise chief listens to all voices, consults with the elders, then makes a decision but only one that will satisfy all parties concerned, otherwise the decision is left until another day and another round of deliberation. Several chiefs offered us thoughtful descriptions of how they operated when decisions had to be made. They would rely on a council, usually of elders and made up of representatives from each village. In none of the cases was the choice of elders based on a democratic vote but a system of patriarchy and kinship relations.16 Often the chief would have a decisive say on who was on the council and on the decision taken. On several occasions chiefs would gladly tell us how they would make decisions on marriages, family or land disputes and other such issues and would sometimes overrule one of the parties. The saying, When the lions fight, even the cows can win means that those in authority must be left to make decisions, others must not quibble; decisions have to be taken by the lions and they have to be followed rather than endlessly disputed. The chief pursues his mission by calling meetings, by assembling the council, and by deciding who is to speak and what the topics for discussion are. The understanding is that the sensibility of the leadership embodies the common good of the community, making it unnecessary and unproductive to take a community vote, which, if divided would
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only make the realisation of that common good that much more difficult to achieve. Steven Robins and Kees van der Waal (2007) conducted ethnographic work on decision-making among the Makuleke in Limpopo province and concluded that one of the distinguishing features of some communities in the Limpopo area is that they have recently adopted democratic structures of decision-making. This is in line with the findings by Jude Fokwang on the Tshivase community in Venda (Fokwang 2003). However, both authors, after comparing their research on other communities and tribal authority structures, come to the conclusion that their cases are relatively uncommon and that most tribal structures are hierarchical and highly exclusionary. Even in these two cases the chief or king has a great deal of latitude in decisionmaking. While there certainly are chiefs in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal who try to include many voices in deliberation, there are those who do not and who practise their leadership in an authoritarian manner. And even those who consult widely do so under conditions that reinforce hierarchy and their authority towards commoners. In the KwaZulu-Natal follow-up we have a detailed account of how chiefs and their councillors are able to dominate village-level decision-making by setting the agenda for discussion and also the rules of engagement during discussion. For anyone familiar with the political science literature on agenda setting and rulemaking (most famously Michels 1962), it will not come as any surprise that the chief and his colleagues were able to dominate discussion, to direct debate to themes they felt comfortable with and to steer clear of discourses that questioned their authority or inability and unwillingness to assist in bringing about different socio-economic conditions for their community. In one case, the method of deliberation at tribal council was rather robust: an induna invoked his right to throw a persistent and critical questioner out of the council meeting, and indeed used his authority to do just that (Teng 2006). In this and other instances, it was evident that the custom is for the traditional leader to control both the organisation and content of the discussion. This practice is inscribed in peoples expectations about how village council meetings will unfold, this ladder of authority and command of public space built into the very notion of what a hereditary leader is. For many citizens living in the former homelands, particularly for the senior generation, the hierarchical authority structure appears to be both a model of the social world and a model for public political behaviour. This does not preclude the existence and the practice of consensus-like decision-making, but it does mean that even apparently democratic processes are nested within, and can be trumped by, this hierarchical authority structure. Hence, the mechanisms used by most particular chiefs and their supporters are not easily compatible with the key suppositions of deliberative democracy. Lungisile Ntsebeza, who lived his early life among chiefs, and then went on to conduct pioneering research on their contemporary status, underlines and geographically expands this thesis (1999, 2005). His work and ours shows that villagers were not treated as equal participants: not only was there a hierarchy of male speakers and a hierarchy among the women, but the chiefs openly discriminated against younger participants in the deliberations. In some instances, chiefs would not attempt to build consensus but stimulated conflict in order to then stifle the development debate a debate everyone obviously would have an interest in and could form a consensus on. Indunas seemed to reverse the right to postpone further deliberations or to terminate debate altogether and, indeed, on at least one occasion, our researcher observed an
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induna ending any further discussion by saying: I do not want to talk about this any more (Teng 2006). His words were final; the debate was closed. So whatever the merits of traditional leadership forms, however much they may be suitable to todays rural political situations, they do not seem to approach Youngs threshold conditions for deliberative democracy. In fact, rather than foster an inclusive conversation conducted in a rational manner designed to inform and transform peoples views in a march toward consensus, the village meetings of many chiefs and indunas were meant to impose their preformed views on the community. In several cases, including that of the KwaZulu induna mentioned above, there can be no doubt - the practices were methods that more resembled authoritarian politics than even their own versions of deliberative democracy. Although we interviewed several Eastern Cape chiefs who professed to adopt democratic methods of deliberation, there were a number of occasions where we witnessed that chiefs insisted that their subjects approach them in a respectful manner (sometimes on their knees, head bowed and essentially waiting for attention).17 And while there certainly are female chiefs in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu, during our interview with the main traditional leaders at the House of Traditional Leaders in Bisho, Eastern Cape, we were struck by the fact that although the contingent of roughly a dozen or so dignitaries who met us was neatly balanced equally in terms of gender, only three males actually spoke during the entire two-hour conversation.18 And our main observation for the day was that whatever the paramount chief said was not challenged by anyone in the room. Partha Chatterjee notes in his analysis of political life in India that the Western debate about civil society assumes that all members of the body politic have the ability to participate in deliberations on a more or less equal footing (Chatterjee 2004, 46-51). Indeed, Young (1990, 1996, 1997, 2000) as well as the most renowned democratic theorists such as Habermas (1979, 1984, 1991, 1996), Bourdieu (1985, 1991, 2000) and Touraine (2000) all worry extensively about situations where the conditions of deliberation are marked by differences in the abilities of participants to deliberate. Even small differences in intellectual and social capital can make a large difference in the ability of participants to put across a point of view, and provide that view with a certain rationality that is to be shared by others. These conditions of roughly equal intellectual and social capital do not and cannot exist in situations where poverty is rampant and in which intellectual capital is highly concentrated in a few individuals (Bourdieu 1991; Cleaver 2005; Fisher and Todd 1986; Gal 1989; Silverstein 2000; Wodak 1989). It is often noted how teachers become spokespersons for larger communities precisely because they are able to articulate a point of view well. Chatterjee argues that the poor are often excluded from civil society in postcolonial and impoverished settings and that these communities often end up with self-appointed individuals speaking on behalf of the group (Chatterjee 2004, 65). These appointees become members of civil society and often claim the mantle of representative for those in what Chatterjee terms political society. We find that a similar kind of situation has developed in rural South Africa where chiefs have taken up that position and are claiming to speak for larger communities such as squatters who find themselves outside civil society. Our observations of these particular cases are compatible with a host of other studies of village-level decision-making across South Africa. Van Kessel and Oomen (1997) suggest that traditional leaders could sway their communities to vote for a
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particular political party. They describe in detail how chiefs and headmen can influence and control their communities. Claassens (2001) classic study on chiefly power, in line with Niehaus (2001) study of witchcraft practices, suggests that chiefs not only wield great political and cultural power, they also hold sway over spiritual power, a not inconsiderable weapon in rural areas where witchcraft practices are still widespread and taken extremely seriously.19 Chiefs and their indunas are authority figures and able to exercise this socio-cultural power, thereby negating the egalitarian principle of deliberative democracy. Ntsebeza (2005) further elaborates on these findings in his analysis of chiefly power in the Eastern Cape, where he demonstrates that democracy has been compromised in order to accommodate chiefly power and authority. While there are certainly some chiefs who would prefer to consign the politics of patrimony and hierarchy to the dustbin of history, the more common practices in the rural hinterlands suggest that such a turn towards progressive politics is still a long way off. The long road to freedom has only just begun in South Africas homelands and hinterlands. Conclusion In the light of these findings, let us return to Youngs performative criteria and sociostructural presuppositions that concern the conditions for the fruition of deliberative democracy. We should also recall that this focusing on deliberative democracy is made relevant because traditional leaders have foregrounded the deliberative democratic dimensions of their institution. A central tenet of deliberative democracy is that it must strive in principle and practice for inclusivity. This would seem to depart from the general institution of traditional authority in that, within its compass, the relative degree of subjects inclusiveness is itself a prerogative of the traditional leader. So, even where local council meetings are more or less inclusive, this does not seem to be an established principle, let alone one that is universally recognised across the variegated forms of traditional leadership. As to the sociostructural conditions, Young and others maintain that deliberative democracy requires a vibrant civil society, and further, that the nexus between civil society and state be characterised as isomorphic, since state-relating civil society institutions serve as the principle platform for citizens inclusion in the states decision-making process. But neither of these structural conditions is present in rural South Africa. As in many other postcolonial societies, marginal peasant populations in South Africa are not enfranchised parts of civil society but rather form a substrata that Partha Chatterjee (2004) refers to as political society. This substratum does not possess the economic, linguistic, or educational capital or the dispositions required to participate in civil society and approach government agencies. Few rural black South Africans contemplate petitioning the state for improved schooling or medical care - much less actually approaching state agencies. The more authoritarian traditional leaders in particular are aiming to fill this vacuum by creating a position for themselves as the representatives of political society (their subjects, as some are fond of declaring), particularly as legally ratified intermediaries between rural populations and the national government. This would serve to consolidate their power and authority under the democratic constitution, albeit in a way that sidesteps most of the rules of democratic accountability.
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A second key tenet of deliberative democracy was that every participant must be appreciated and treated as politically equal to all other participants. This requires both that the decision-making process eschew any forms of social hierarchisation and that the participants possess relatively equal amounts of social capital (that is, having the education, income, and linguistic skills needed to voice ones opinion in the public political sphere). Within the local social space of traditional leadership, neither of these requirements is even approximated. The reality is that access to the decision-making process is organised along lines of gender and generation, as well as the social ranking embodied in the notion of traditional leaders who command their citizen-subjects respect, not only in terms of their accomplishment but their heredity. What this means is that however well the institution of chieftainship may function at the present political juncture, most of the village councils run by chiefs seem to presuppose that they function on a basis of inequality. The notion of state functionality is critical here. Youngs work is based on the supposition that higher levels of political organisation will subsume lower levels and that the capillary powers of the state are such that, throughout its territory, it can effect positive and significant changes in the life chances of the citizenry. The act of civil participation is thus rewarded by gaining an ability to persuade the state to enact forms of improvement for those active citizens. Again, the current conditions in South Africa are far removed from such a situation (Koelble, LiPuma and Balchin 2008). Instead, as we have attempted to underscore, it is the virtual absence of local government structures that provides the social political space for traditional authorities to reconstruct themselves as representatives of their communities, frequently against the wishes of even a majority of those populations. These authorities often stand in an especially tense opposition to the educated members of the junior generation. The telling question is what happens when the state is invisible in the lives of its citizens to the point where it appears to abrogate its constitutional responsibilities through its sheer incapacity to act on its citizens behalf. In such a situation, citizens tend to see the act of participation as pointless and accordingly, to leave the business of representation to those who have the local knowledge, incentive, and the cultural capital to do so, which in turn gives rise to governance organised around purely local concerns in defence of an identity-determined politics. That, in a nutshell, constitutes one of the paramount difficulties in the transformation of rural political culture, not just in South Africa but across a broad range of rural postcolonial settings. Finally, in Youngs analysis it is imperative that citizens are prepared to bracket their differences and assume a position in which the multicultural arrangement is seen as the best approach for the democratic enterprise to succeed amongst a free and equal citizenry. But the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa do not on the whole correspond to such a presupposition. Indeed, the very notion of reasonableness that is inscribed in the politics overseen by traditional leaders is not one that Young would recognise, simply because the socio-cultural context is built upon radically different assumptions about the nature of governance - not least, that consensus is hierarchy-driven. The concentration on the local, the defence of community and custom, are on the whole, opposed to the politics of multiculturalism, rational deliberation, equal representation and articulation which lie at the heart of Youngs attempt to construct deliberative democracy. While it is not inconceivable that one could imagine a system of local difference and national unity
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based on a form of multicultural agency, it is unlikely that it will spring from the kind of politics practised in the South African hinterlands. Political luminaries such as Mandela and Holomisa wax lyrical about the possibility and prospects for the ascent of a direct, community-based, indigenously African-inspired democracy, but the reality in the villages is a good deal more rugged, and in its present incarnation provides unfertile soil for a truly participatory democracy to emerge. Both the structure and evolution of traditional leadership is founded on a hierarchisation which, being institutionally primary, does not easily meld with or accommodate the basic principles of deliberative democracy. Moreover, it is not simply a question of engendering equality among citizens in a context which has, historically, sought to shape pliable subjects rather than thoughtful citizens out of the populace; subjects predisposed to be unwilling to question their authority figures and, in any case, ones who were never well enough educated in the arts of democratic deliberation to make deliberative democracy viable. The inequality thus has an institutional basis that goes beyond the wayward actions of a few who openly abuse their authority. For deliberative democracy traditional leadership anyway possesses an inherently authoritarian dimension that no amount of rational argument could square. That said, traditional leadership, despite the rhetoric of timeless tradition, has never been immune to change, and presently some progressive leaders are attempting to recalibrate the institution so that it becomes far more democratic, so that all that remains of the past would be the quasi-hereditary recruitment. The idea is that an enlightened and tempered monarchy can be truly directly democratic, in ways more in keeping with African traditions and hence more suitable to promoting successful governance, especially in the hinterlands. But two factors militate against what is essentially a modernist version of traditional leadership. The first is that many (perhaps most) traditional leaders have neither the inclination nor capacity to embrace a modernist liberal perspective to the point where they transmute their practices. After all, cosmopolitan chiefs or statesmen such as Mandela are the exception, not the norm. The second is the structural question of national oversight and institutional mechanisms that would make traditional leaders accountable for their remarks and actions. There is a marked absence of institutional control to ensure that local decisions are translated to the municipal level without the intervention of the agent, in this case the chiefs acting on behalf of their community. Until these two fundamental criteria are met - which means produced reciprocally, the creation of agents disposed to deliberate, and a transformed institution with government oversight and enforcement of equality - the ideals of deliberative democracy in the context of southern African village decision-making are very unlikely to be translated into reality. Traditional leadership, while by no means anti-democratic, is not a guarantee of African democracy. On the contrary, under current conditions it is likely to entrench autocracy, patrimony, and despotism, and if left without citizen education, it will not lead to the reformation of this institution and the creation of oversight and accountability. Acknowledgements
Funding to support the research for this article was provided by the South African National Research Foundation and the University of Cape Towns block grant system. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
220 Notes
1. Interview with Pathekile Holomisa, president of CONTRALESA, 23 September 2002, House of Assembly, Cape Town. 2. Interview with Pathekile Holomisa, 23 September 2002, House of Assembly, Cape Town. 3. In addition to this text, see Young (1990, 1996 and 1997). 4. For an excellent review of the literature on the re-invention of peasant social structures and political agency of traditional leadership under the various pressures of colonialism and postcolonialism, in this case in Tanzania, see Roderick P. Neumann (1998, 1550). 5. We recognise that the homeland experiences with the anti-apartheid civics movement during the 1980s produced a variety of outcomes in terms of the relationship between traditional authorities and the general population. These differences are captured well in the work by Barbara Oomen (2005). 6. Interview with Pathekile Holomisa, 23 September 2002, House of Assembly, Cape Town. 7. Several chiefs stated this position in the interviews we conducted with them. 8. Interview with Pathekile Holomisa, 23 September 2002, House of Assembly, Cape Town. 9. Interview with Holomisa Nqoro, 9 October 2002, IDASA ofces, Cape Town. 10. The difculties inherent in this project are illustrated by the legal action taken by Tinyiko Nwamitwa-Shilubana (ANC MP) against her cousin Sidwell Nwamitwa, whom she accuses of having usurped her title to chieftaincy. Mr Nwamiwta was appointed by Ms Nwamitwa-Shilubana to act as chief in her place while she was involved in parliamentary duties in 1996. Her attempts to overturn a Pretoria High Court ruling in which she lost her title to her cousin have been sharply criticised by the leaders of CONTRALESA who suggest that she must abide by custom and should not misuse the constitution to undermine their interpretation of customary law. The High Court held that under customary law women could not become chiefs and thereby enforced a position disputed by social scientists and legal experts alike. See Christelle Terreblanche, Womans battle to be chief pits traditional leaders against their past, The Sunday Independent, 6 May 2007. 11. The research reports can be viewed at the Centre for Social Science Research, University of Cape Town and the Institute for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal. 12. Robert Teng, Cant say no to the chief, for the School of International Training, Spring 2006. 13. Interview with H. Nqoro, chief from Idutywa, Eastern Cape, 9 October 2002, Cape Town. 14. Interview with M. Ditshwa, 8 November 2002, Umtata, Eastern Cape. 15. Personal recollections of Thobani Matheza, who was the main researcher and conducted many of the interviews in rural KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape. 16. Pietos Mathebe, one of the founding members of CONTRALESA and a chief well regarded by the ANC, explained the system in his kinship in these terms: In the tribe we got what we call Nkosi, which is the head of the community, then we got tribal elders, tribal council then is the community. The tribal elders is made out of Bakgomana that is Bakgomanabamoshate, Bakgomana is chiefs brothers and uncles; by saying uncles I am referring to the ones of Mathebe not the maternal ones but the paternal ones, the ones closest to the chiefs family. Chief Pietos Mathebe, 4 September 2002, House of Assembly, Cape Town. 17. In one notable case, Koelble witnessed the following spectacle. In Venda, a contender to the Venda throne was greeted by his subjects by them throwing themselves on the ground in front of their paramount chief, covering their hair and heads with dust, and covering their eyes before they were told to rise and go about their normal business. This sign of respect was considered normal behaviour by supposedly equal citizens in a constitutional democracy. In another instance, one of our researchers was made to wait for four hours outside the chiefs hut (while the chief was inside) and asked, on several occasions, whether he had brought a gift of liquor. We might add that the chiefs retinue was armed and did not hesitate to show off their weaponry; it was not clear whether this was intended to intimidate our researcher or was merely a gesture of power and authority in this remote region of the Eastern Cape. 18. This interview took place on 1 July 2003 at the House of Traditional Leaders in Bisho. 19. This does not mean that chiefs are the only powerful people in rural communities. Others may hold spiritual and socio-economic power, yet the fact remains that chiefs represent a
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group of individuals with a great deal of decision-making latitude in those regions of the country untouched by the modern state. And until that state extends its footprint into such regions, it is likely that chiefdomship will remain a powerful political force.>
Notes on contributors
Edward LiPuma is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Miami, Florida, USA. He is the author of several books including Encompassing others: The magic of modernity in Melanesia, Michigan University Press (2000); and The gift of kinship: Structure and practice in Maring social organization, Cambridge University Press (1988). He has also published in a wide cross-section of journals including Public Culture, Identities, Cultural Anthropology and Democratization. His email address is: elipuma@comcast.net. Thomas Koelble is Professor of Business Administration in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of books that include The global economy and democracy in South Africa, Rutgers University Press (1998). He has also published in Comparative Politics, Politics and Society, Democratization and New Political Economy, among others. His email address is: Tkoelble@gsb.uct.ac.za.
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Journal of Contemporary African Studies Vol. 27, No.

2, April 2009, 201223

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

E. LiPuma and T.A. Koelble

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

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