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Traditional authorities in Africa
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ISBN: 1281988332 9786611988333 9048506581 9087280521 9789048506583 9781281988331 9789087280529 9790000000000 Year: 2008 Publisher: [Amsterdam] Leiden University Press

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Traditional authority is a distinguishing feature in the landscape of contemporary Africa. It remains important in organising the life of the people at the local level despite modern state structures. And since the 1990's, African governments, international institutions and donor organisations have shown a renewed interest in it. As a result, a large number of African countries have enhanced or formalised the position of their chiefs. At the same time, however, this resurgence of traditional authority coincides with the wave of democratisation across sub- Saharan Africa, and many question the desirability and legitimacy of traditional authority in modern forms of governance.

Le retour des rois : les autorités traditionnelles et l'Etat en Afrique contemporaine
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ISBN: 2845863438 9782845863439 Year: 2003 Publisher: Paris : Karthala,


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The politics of custom : chiefship, capital, and the state in contemporary Africa
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ISBN: 9780226510767 022651076X 9780226510934 022651093X 022651109X Year: 2018 Publisher: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press,

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How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post-Cold War era-changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated. This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises-from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers-but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that "traditional" authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa's history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.


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Kingdoms and chiefdoms of southeastern Africa : oral traditions and history, 1400-1830
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ISBN: 1580468764 1580465145 Year: 2015 Publisher: Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press,

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The emergence of well-known southern African kingdoms such as the famous kingdoms of the AmaZulu, AmaSwazi, and BaSotho in the early nineteenth century was the culmination of centuries of social and political developments that reflected the consolidation of the political control of ruling descent lines of small-scale chiefdoms across the region. This book traces events and developments among the peoples living in the regions of modern KwaZulu-Natal, Swaziland, southern Mozambique, and Lesotho from 1400 to 1830, as related in indigenous oral traditions and histories, in order to explain the social and political factors propelling sociopolitical consolidation and the emergence of chiefdoms and kingdoms. Elizabeth A. Eldredge is the author of The Creation of the Zulu Kingdom, 1815-1828: War, Shaka, and the Consolidation of Power (2014), Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960 (2007), and A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho (2002).

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