Indigenous authorities and the post‐colonial state: the domestication of indigeneity and African nationalism in South Africa

Abstract

Since the advent of the African Union, confidence in Africa’s renaissance has been high, but a number of state‐civil society anxieties continue to challenge stable social relations. One area of anxiety concerns post‐colonial African governments’ attempts to incorporate traditional authorities into largely secular, constitutional democracies. Indigenous authorities have been a significant part of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history – in resistance and collaboration – and are widely imagined to be part of the country’s political culture for the foreseeable future. The post‐1994 African nationalist government sought to deal with the indigenous through the formal regulation of indigenous authorities and the integration of indigenous institutions into the fledgling democracy, without adjusting the provisions of South Africa’s culture of secular constitutionalism. In this article, I explore the possibility that the post‐apartheid state’s promotion of religious, linguistic and cultural rights, and its protection of indigenous authorities through legislation serve to domesticate and exclude such organic, indigenous institutions and social movements from matters of state making. I argue that while such domestication is a feature of the contemporary situation, it is made more complicated by the sources of sacred power, which ideas of tradition and indigeneity offer African nationalism.

Keywords:

• indigeneity
• post‐colonial
• post‐apartheid
• African nationalism
• nativism
• rights