Custom and exploitation: rethinking the origins of the modern African chieftaincy in the political economy of colonialism

Institutions and idioms of ‘customary’ authority have returned to prominence in sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the ‘rush’ for its landed resources. But how is ‘the chieftaincy’ itself to be conceptualised within agrarian political economy? This contribution initiates a materialist investigation, focussing on the origins of its modern form in the colonial period. Contrary to Mamdani’s (Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism, London: James Currey, 1996) influential theorisation, it is proposed that the key to its constitution as a distinctive fusion of political and landed power lies in the varied forms of exploitation that mediated and expressed Africa's capitalist development under colonial conditions. This is pursued through a comparison of how the imperial authorities turned to the chieftaincy as a means of addressing the overarching challenge of how to subjugate African labour to metropolitan and settler capital, while constructing stable systems of colonial domination in British West, East and South Africa. Although this choice of cases is selective, it is nevertheless suggestive of the ways in which this contradiction between accumulation and control would become embodied in the chieftaincy itself. The conclusion briefly considers how this intrinsic dynamic might be playing out in the land struggles of the present.