‘Our Traditions are Modern, Our Modernities Traditional’: Chieftaincy and Democracy in Contemporary Cameroon and Botswana

Abstract

In this paper, I have argued that, instead of being pushed  aside by the modern power elites – as was widely predicted both by  modernisation theorists and their critics – chieftaincy has displayed  remarkable dynamics and adaptability to new socio-economic and  political developments, without becoming totally transformed in the  process. Chiefdoms and chiefs have become active agents in the quest  by the new elites for ethnic, cultural symbols as a way of maximising  opportunities at the centre of bureaucratic and state power, and at the  home village where control over land and labour often require both  financial and symbolic capital. Chieftaincy, in other words, remains  central to ongoing efforts at developing democracy and accountability  in line with the expectations of Africans as individual ‘citizens’ and  also as ‘subjects’ of various cultural communities. The paper uses  Cameroon and Botswana as case studies, to argue that the rigidity and  prescriptiveness of modernist partial theories have left a major gap in  scholarship on chiefs and chieftaincy in Africa. It stresses that studies  of domesticated agency in Africa are sorely needed to capture the creative  ongoing processes and to avoid overemphasising structures and  essentialist perceptions on chieftaincy and the cultural communities  that claim and are claimed by it. Scholarship that is impatient with  the differences and diversities that empirical research highlights,  runs the risk of pontification or orthodoxy. Such stunted or reductionist  scholarship, like rigid notions of liberal democracy, is akin  to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would rather trim a  corpse than expand his/her coffin to accommodate a man-mountain,  or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every  problem is a nail.