The author first traces the successive approaches to African chieftaincy in the course of the 20th century, contrasting the dualistic and the transactionalist models. He then examines the thesis... Show moreThe author first traces the successive approaches to African chieftaincy in the course of the 20th century, contrasting the dualistic and the transactionalist models. He then examines the thesis of the resilient chief by considering a case from western central Zambia. He shows that the power base of local chiefs and their room for manouvring is weakening and that the chiefs are experimenting with new strategies in order to survive. They are driven into the arms of new actors on the local scene, against whom they are rather defenceless. One such new actor is an ethnic voluntary organization, the Kazanga Cultural Association. This NGO has been amazingly successful in bridging indigenous politics and the State in a process of ethnicization. Gradually, the revival of chieftainship which this NGO has brought about, is turning out to lead not to resilience but to impotent folklorization. Chiefs who are unable to link their symbolic capital - their ceremonial functions - to the experimental worlds of the urbanites, find themselves locked into a position of declining significance. Show less
Many local tenure arrangements in Niger were largely implicit, not recorded in any codified form. In the process of codification now underway, chiefs are regarded as the key interpreters of... Show moreMany local tenure arrangements in Niger were largely implicit, not recorded in any codified form. In the process of codification now underway, chiefs are regarded as the key interpreters of tradition, mutating the implicit into the explicit. Land tenure reform is not without contradictions. How are chiefs to maintain a level of flexibility and dynamism within the codified, rigidified form that the local tenure arrangements will have once they are made explicit? How are chiefs to determine which implicit local customary practice is to have primacy in a codified form, since their parameters are always changing from season to season and from year to year? As the new 'Code rural' in Niger shows, the invention-of-tradition approach which has gained prominence in English-language research has failed in its French counterparts. Both planner-administrators and academics are engaged in a discourse that seems to take tradition as an undisputed given. The remarkable thing is that is appears to work. The 'Code rural' has been considered path-breaking and innovative because it seeks to modernize tenure rules without breaking with tradition. The conclusion is that land tenure legislation can be modernized by integrating traditional chiefs into the legal framework. Show less
