John Comaroff Publishes A Reflection On Sovereignty, Postcoloniality And The Commodification Of Traditional Authority In South Africa
A number of ‘customary’ African kings and chiefs – historically accountable to the will of their subjects – have sought to turn their offices into lucrative sources of accumulation; indeed, into a form of monopoly capital founded on the assertion of a political sovereignty unaccountable to any other. What historical conditions have laid the ground for this transformation? How widespread is it? What, in the ‘new’ economies, technologies, ideologies and politics of the global order, has given the Kingdom of Custom its material, affective and political heft in this, the twenty-first century? In addressing these questions with particular focus on South Africa, Comaroff explores the relationship between ‘local’ structural conditions and those exogenous to the country in order to explain ongoing transformations in traditional authority – and their impact on the political and cultural economy of the nation at large.
The essay, “Chiefship, Pty unLtd.: Reflections on Sovereign Un/accountability, Past and Present,” is published in the European anthropology journal, Ethnos; see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2023.2261652.
Synopsis: This narrative begins with the story of a king from the Eastern Cape Province exercising sovereignty over life and death – and, in so doing, pitting himself, along with other South African traditional leaders, against the state, its constitution and the liberal democratic ideology of a nation recently reborn. It documents a protracted, ongoing struggle – with roots deep in the colonial epoch – between two political theologies. One is civic-national, the other ethno-racial. Each aspires to a hegemony that remains incomplete. This struggle has been, is being, fought out in many registers: over land, labor, law, life-and-death; over recognition, rights, regulation and rents. It has been interminably messy, with lots of ups and downs, lots at stake, lots more to come. Its broader, exogenous context has arisen from changes in the global order, its economies, technologies, ideologies, politics. Its proximate context lies in the complex, labile sociology of post-apartheid South Africa. In respect of the latter, of the proximate, Comaroff shows how rising identity politics have given the Kingdom of Custom – a thoroughly anti-liberal, Afromodernist construct – renewed affective, economic and electoral heft for many black South Africans. The constitutional protection of the customary, and its sacralization, has fueled insistent chiefly claims to territory, material and immaterial property, and, most of all, sovereign unaccountability; claims justified by the reconstruction of so-called traditional authority under colonialism, in violation of indigenous theories and practices of government. Comaroff also shows how the broader context – the neoliberal turn to the ethic of the market, the privatization of public assets, the stress on deregulation and the outsourcing of the state – has engendered the means and ends for commodifying cultural difference, turning it into rents and profits; indeed, into corporate ethnicity and, for so-called ‘business chiefs,’ into new species of political and financial capital. In sum, Chiefship Pty unLtd, the phenomenon, is a creature of contemporary political-economy, a hyphe-nated fusion,
both hot and cold, of the exogenous and the proximate: hot, in that it rests on new passions; cold, in that its transactions occur within the chill logic of cost–benefit calculation. If these are the conditions, both necessary and sufficient, that have remade the Kingdom of Custom, those who rule in its name range widely in their capacity to reap its harvest; this for reasons ecological, cultural, political, transactional, circumstantial. Therein lies the complex relationship between the Kingdom and its Kings: the forms of accumulation, of monopoly capital, that the kingdom promises and potentiates – mythically grounded in a promiscuous mix of revisionist history and putative ontology, facilitated by conditions in the contemporary global order – depend in large measure on the capacity of living rulers to husband the resources at their disposal. And, more importantly, to sustain the integrity of the king’s two bodies against the political forces that may drive a wedge between them. Thus, for better or worse – depending on one’s ideological take on such matters – does Chiefship Pty unLtd move from an aspirational imagining to a more or less accomplished fact.