Emile Adriaan Benvenuto van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal Livres

Many contemporary studies of African chieftaincy are devoted to unraveling "chiefly tradition." These studies have tried to unmask chieftaincy as an artifact of modernist projections of colonial rule, missionary activity and postcolonial state formation. African chiefs and their authority have often been focal points of social and political power, and in the creation and subjugation of ethnic groups. Research on chieftaincy reveals continuities and discontinuities that are highly pertinent to understanding African societies today. This research forms the core of this volume. Chiefs are shown to be highly varied in their responses to state authority and to the wishes and demands of their subjects. They are analyzed here in light of the many diverse forces that determine their positions, their symbolic functions, and the resources they can mobilize within African societies and polities. New light is also shed on the pre-colonial history of chieftaincy and on its diasporic spread to places inside and outside Africa. The book will give further breadth and depth to the study of contemporary African chieftaincy.

Africa has been given persistently the negative image of the lost political turmoil, economic failures, hunger, disease, irresponsible and irrational warlords and corrupt regimes. Such a bias calls for a critique. The authors seek to analyse power divisions and struggles over sovereignty and legitimacy in African societies from a historical point of view. Possibilities for peaceful social relations are taken as much into account as internal frictions between state and "traditional authorities". In a striking difference to the legitimacy claims of single-rooted states, political legitimacy in many African states derives from two the imposed European colonial states and the pre-colonial African polities. State and traditional authorities (systems of chieftaincy) depend on each other's contributions in striving towards the goals they both desire to achieve in the fields of development, stable democratic governance and human rights. "Indigenous" institutions are not necessarily inferior to state institutions. The opposite might be true in view of the capacity of the traditional institutions not just to decide internal disputes, but actually to solve them and thus contribute to social cohesion. Such a perspective is highly relevant for a variety of concrete social relations of which gender relations are one important aspect.