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

Abstract

Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. By J. Michael Williams. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pp. viii, 282; maps, bibliography, index, list of abbreviations. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. "One of the most vivid political reminders of the apartheid past, the institution of chieftaincy" (p. 1), has maintained its legitimacy in a country where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has dedicated itself since 1994 to eradicating that past. J. Michael Williams explores how the "conflicting worldviews about the nature of authority and the right to rule" (p. 2) between chieftaincy and the post-apartheid state have produced an inevitable struggle about political legitimacy. To understand how this struggle plays out at the local level, he focuses on three chieftaincies in KwaZulu-Natal in order to "tell the stories of real South Africans dealing with the everyday struggles that exist in the postapartheid dispensation" (p. 31). Utilizing "the multiple legitimacies framework," he argues "that even though both the democratic state institutions and the chieftaincy seek to exercise exclusive political control in the rural areas" (p. 19), neither is able to dominate. Instead, the outcome is a "syncretism of authority relations" in which "the different sources of legitimacy overlap" (p. 19). Having introduced his overall argument in the Introduction, Williams uses the next six chapters to understand how and why the chieftaincy in each of his three study areas remains "a central pillar to the local populations" (p. 38). The second chapter, "The Binding Together of the People," examines chieftaincy in historical perspective and how through the changing circumstance of colonial and apartheid rule the principle of the unity of the community through the chieftaincy persevered. This was in large part due to the chiefs and izinduna ("headmen") learning "to selectively invoke particular principles and ideas in different circumstances" (p. 79). The third chapter "examines the national debates concerning the chieftaincy in the 1990s" (p. 80), and the official integration of the institution into the new constitutional order, which resulted in the creation of a mixed polity. With the passage of the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act (TLGF Act) in 2003, the ANC seemingly came to recognize "the unique qualities of the chieftaincy and that it indeed occupies a space distinct from the state or civil society" (p. 106). The next chapters focus on the local level to gain insight into how the TLGF Act was largely reactive to events unfolding from the early 1990s. …