Chieftaincy and Civilisation: African Structures of Government and Colonial Administration in South Africa

Abstract

It is generally accepted by scholars of Africa that what came to be known as customary law was the result of an interaction between indigenous and colonial elites, each manipulating an awkward system for their own ends. In this regard the powers assigned to chiefs by the colonial states of South Africa were no different, an amalgam of local agency and central authority. This article explores the latter end of the equation: the metropolitan and colonial ideas which exerted a powerful influence on notions of chieftaincy which prevail today. This is not an article about chiefs; it is an article about the ways in which white administrators thought about, and shaped, the powers of African chiefs in South Africa. Born of the ambiguities of liberalism, and the precepts of evolution, Western notions of chiefly authority provided a justification for authoritarian rule in the second half of the nineteenth century, and into the present.