Custom and the politics of sovereignty in South Africa

Journal of Social History

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2006, Pages

  Crais, Clifton ^a,b  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Department of History ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646511326     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2006.0002     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996).
2. See, for example, Barbara Oomen, " 'Walking in the middle of the Road': People's Perspectives on the Legitimacy of Traditional Leadership in Sekhukhune, South Africa," African Studies Centre, Leiden, 17 January 2002.
3. Oomen has a book in press on the politics of traditional rule in contemporary South Africa. Thomas Koelble and Edward LiPuma are doing important work on chiefship and liberal democracy. See, for example, their "Chiefs and Democrats: On the Compatibility of Political Democracy and Traditional Leadership in South Africa," unpub. Paper, 2003.
4. and "Limits to Liberation: Cultural Politics in the Age of Globalization," in Steven Robins, ed., Limits to Liberation: Citizenship and Governance after Apartheid (Cape Town, 2004).
5. See Daily Dispatch, for coverage of Matanzima's death and funeral.
6. Act. No. 41 of 2003: Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Amendment Act, 2003," in Republic of South Africa, Government Gazette, v. 262, 19 (Dec. 2003). This legislation is discussed in the paper's conclusion.
7. David Held, "The Changing Structure of International Law: Sovereignty Transformed?" in Held and McGrew, eds., The Global Transformations Reader (Cambridge, 2000, 2002), 162-76, 162-4.
8. See also, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991);
9. Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge, 2001 )
10. and Jens Bartelson, idem, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1995).
11. Bartelson, Genealogy of Sovereignty. For Hobbes, the sovereign brought domestic order but created anarchy internationally.
12. On the Hobbesian dilemma see Keohane, "Sovereignty in International Society," in Held and McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader.
13. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1911, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), 121.
14. Pierre Bourdieu, "Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure in the Bureaucratic Field," in George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, 1999), 53.
15. See also Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge, 2001)
16. and Jens Bartelson, idem, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1995).
17. Pierre Bourdieu, "Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field," in Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture, 68.
18. See, for example, Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn
19. See Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge, 2002).
20. See, for example, Thomas McClendon, "The Man Who Would be Inkosi: Civilising Missions in Shepstone's Early Career," JSAS, 30, 2 (June 2004): 339-58;
21. Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil.
22. See, for example, J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981)
23. and, more recently, Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation if Southern Africa, 1815-1854 (London, 2001).
24. The great exception of course was the Zulu kingdom. However, for an important revision of how we understand the kingdom see Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)
25. Peires, House of Phalo;
26. Etherington, Great Treks. Cf. Igor Kopytoff, ed., The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington, 1987).
27. Sara Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, 1993), 27.
28. See Crais, Politics of Evil. A closer reading of this historical writing (and here I include my own early work) does not reveal much of a hermeneutical analysis of official texts or much attention to the sociology of early colonial knowledge, particularly its negotiated nature. This naturally led scholars to analyses of ethnicity as largely colonial inventions mediated only by African intellectual representations. In one sense the historiography has reproduced the gaze of early officialdom, at times assuming the categories that shaped the production of knowledge and which constituted the archive as reflecting social reality. They were also largely accepting unquestionably African elite representations of the past, for example Zulu royal assertions around what defined the political boundaries of the kingdom. As Glassman has written, following Nietzsche, "in defining" the "phenomenon" of ethnicity "we deny it a history,"
29. Jonathon Glassman, "Slower than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa," American Historical Review, 109, 3 (June 2004): 720-54
30. The Creation of Invisible Histories," in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999), 182-216.
31. See Feierman, "Creation of Invisible Histories";
32. Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000);
33. Crais, Politics of Evil.
34. Inkosi is a wonderfully plastic term. Its linkage to status and authority is clear and ancient for large areas of Eastern, Southern, and South-Central Africa. It has still earlier roots relating to the word for lion in West and West-Central African languages. Initially, it appears to have meant a "strong or mature person, particularly (though not necessarily only?) male, having authority overa small group of kin," in short, the head of an extended family. In South Africa the word is retains its honorific history. The word's root forms part of the common word for "thanks." In areas where states did emerge, the word could mean both chief and king, the latter modified by the adjective "great". In other words a "king" was a "great chief." Such also was the case for so-called paramount chiefs; what distinguished a paramount from a king would become the subject of considerable and ongoing discussion and debate. According to Ehret, "*-kosi enlarged its scope to the leader of a larger local grouping of people, metaphorically invoking but no longer literally connoting the role of a head of a family." Inkosi is, finally, used as "God", as in "Inkosi Sikulele Afrika", "God Bless Africa," South Africa's national anthem. What exactly inkosi meant, then, may be less apparent than usually assumed. The very plasticity of the word is suggestive of the ambiguities of power and authority in the pre-colonial era. Ehret, An African Classical Age, 148-9, 251.
35. Among the Shona the word could mean "senior wife," while among the Manyika, also in Zimbabwe, a form of the word means "headman." See Ehret, African Classical Age 148;
36. Guthrie, Comparative Bantu, vol. 3 (Farnborough, 1967), 289, C.S. 1102*-koci.; a history of the word's meanings could offer a richer understanding of South African political history.
37. See also David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe ( Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), for another example.
38. In a similar fashion Feierman has written of the alternative forms of authority in East Africa. See "The Creation of Invisible Histories," in Bonnell and Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn, 182-216.
39. BC 293, B2731, Edmonstone, Judge and Grant to Secretary of Native Affairs, 30 Dec. 1872.
40. BC 293, B 263.17, Stanford, statement of Xelo, 8 Feb. 1872.
41. BC 293, B2731, Edmonstone, Judge and Grant to Secretary of Native Affairs, 30 Dec. 1872.
42. BC 293, B2731, Edmonstone, Judge and Grant to Secretary of Native Affairs, 30 Dec. 1872.
43. CO 4521, Office of resident with Gangelizwe, 28 Oct. 1875.
44. CMT 1/143, minutes of meeting, 24 June 1884.
45. CMK 1/94, Hope to Brownlee, 4 Sept. 1879.
46. BC 293, D10, ms. of Rev. E.J. Warners, n.d., t.s.
47. CO 4521, Graham, Unannexed Tembuland, 16 Aug. 1881
48. CO 1156, Leonard, Opinion, 23 Apr. 1881.
49. 1/COF 9/1/44, Extracts from the Report of the Government Commission on Native Laws and Customs, Jan. 1883.
50. CO 4521, office of resident with Gangelizwe, 28 Oct. 1875.
51. CMT 1/27, list.
52. See Crais, Politics of Evil;
53. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers.
54. Howard Rogers, Native Administration in the Union of South Africa (Johannesburg, 1933), 220.
55. See, for example, Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.
56. NA 158, Shaw, Report, Jan. 1878.
57. Feierman. On social movement see Crais, Politics of Evil.
58. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy and Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996).
59. Quoted in Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 71
60. BC 293, D10, ms. of Rev. E.J. Warners, n.d., t.s. We do not know to what extent and in what manner officials, in devising legislation such as the 1927 Native Administration Act, consulted the documentary record beyond that of laws and proclamations; to my knowledge there is no study of the kinds of historical claims officials were making as part of the law-making process. However, it seems highly likely that they did precisely this, in effect trying to re-imagine the sorts of political arrangements that had been put together in the early years of colonial rule and their bearing on the political and economic context of the twentieth century. Rogers, Native Administration in the Union of South Africa, for example, provides precisely this documentary history of policy. The most obvious change center on the 1910 Union of South Africa and the increasing reliance of the mining industry on labor from within South Africa.
61. (UMT) CMT 66/177, Secretary for NA to CMT, notes by CMT, 9 Mar. 1953 [1956?].
62. CMT 3/1451, report for 1955.
63. 1/ALC 10/11, "Bantu Authorities," n.d. [1963].
64. Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 251.
65. In practice of course expedience outweighed allegiance to ethnography. The NAD was more than willing to create chiefs where no existed or appoint chiefs purely on the basis of their collaboration.
66. 1/BIZ 6/47, Ramsay to Secretary for Bantu Administration and Development, 21 Nov. 1958
67. 1/BIZ 6/47, Ramsay to Secretary for Bantu Administration and Development, 21 Nov. 1958
68. "COSATU Submission on the Draft Paper on Traditional Leadership and Governance," 30 Nov. 2002.
69. Patekile Holomisa, "Traditional Leadership in a Post-Colonial SA," Focus 31 (Sept. 2003).
70. Prince Mashele, "Traditional Leadership in Historical Context," Municipal Talk (May 2003).
71. Municipal Structures Act No. 177 of 1998.
72. Daily Dispatch, 5 Sept. 2000.
73. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers (Princeton, 2001), 277.
74. Communal Land Rights Bill, October 2003.
75. PLAAS/NLC Community Consultation project on the CLRB, "Submission to the Portfolio Committee for Land and Agriculture," 10 Nov. 2003.
76. Edward Lahiff, "Land Reform and Sustainable Livelihoods in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province," IDS, March 2003.
77. See also Koelble and LiPuma, "Chiefs and Bureaucrats."