Post-1994, South Africa's traditional leaders have fought for recognition, and positioned themselves as major players in the South African political landscape. Yet their role in a democracy is ...contested, with leaders often accused of abusing power, disregarding human rights, expropriating resources and promoting tribalism. Some argue that democracy and traditional leadership are irredeemably opposed and cannot co-exist. Meanwhile, shifts in the political economy of the former bantustans - the introduction of platinum mining in particular - have attracted new interests and conflicts to these areas, with chiefs often designated as custodians of community interests. This edited volume explores how chieftancy is practised, experienced and contested in contemporary South Africa. It includes case studies of how those living under the authority of chiefs, in a modern democracy, negotiate or resist this authority in their respective areas. Chapters in this book are organised around three major sites of contest: leadership, land and law.
Dispossession is characteristically associated with the period of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Consequently, not much consideration is given to how the previously marginalised continue ...to be dispossessed in their everyday lives by coal mining activities in the current political dispensation. This article reframes dispossession as a perpetual post-apartheid experience in African communities. In this paper, dispossession does not only encompass events of deprivation, and the loss of land and property, but also covers the loss of the incorporeal. The relocation of African ancestral graves in Tweefontein (Ogies) is discussed as an aspect of dispossession. The politics surrounding household relocations and grave exhumations illustrates how communities not only lose the material; land and tombs, but also lose their intangible possessions; ancestral connection, identity, heritage and belonging because of mining.
Who controls the land and minerals in the former Bantustans of South Africa - chiefs, the state or landholders? Disputes are taking place around the ownership of resources, decisions about their ...exploitation and who should benefit. With respect to all of these issues, the courts have become increasingly important. The contributors to Land, Law and Chiefs in Rural South Africa capture some of these intense contestations over land, law and political authority, focussing on threats to the rights of ordinary people. History and customary law feature strongly in most disputes and succession to chieftaincy is also frequently disputed. Judges have to make decisions in a context where rival claimants to property or office assert their own versions of history and custom. The South African constitution recognises customary law and the courts are attempting to incorporate and develop this branch of jurisprudence as 'living customary law'. Lawyers, community leaders and academics are called on to assist in researching cases around restitution, land rights and customary law. The chapters in this collection discuss legal cases and policy directions that have evolved since 1994. Some chapters analyse the increasing power of chiefs in the South African rural areas, while others suggest that the courts are giving support to popular rights over land and supporting local democratic processes. Contributors record significant pushback from groups that reject traditional authority. These political tensions are a central theme of the collection and thus serve as vital case studies in furthering our understanding of rights and restitution in South Africa. Who controls the land and minerals in the former Bantustans of South Africa - chiefs, the state or landholders? Disputes are taking place around the ownership of resources, decisions about their exploitation and who should benefit. With respect to all of these issues, the courts have become increasingly important. The contributors to Land, Law and Chiefs in Rural South Africa capture some of these intense contestations over land, law and political authority, focussing on threats to the rights of ordinary people. Judges have to make decisions in a context where rival claimants to property or office assert their own versions of history and custom. The South African constitution recognises customary law and the courts are attempting to incorporate and develop this branch of jurisprudence as 'living customary law'. Lawyers, community leaders and academics are called on to assist in researching cases around restitution, land rights and customary law. The chapters in this collection discuss legal cases and policy directions that have evolved since 1994. Some analyse the increasing power of chiefs in the South African rural areas. Others suggest that the courts are giving support to popular rights over land and supporting local democratic processes. These political tensions are a central theme of the collection.
The Covid-19 pandemic threw into stark relief the multi-dimensional threats created by neoliberal capitalism. Government measures to alleviate the crisis were largely inadequate, leaving women – in ...particular working-class women – to carry the increased burden of care work while at the same time placing themselves in direct risk as frontline workers. Emancipatory Feminism in the Time of Covid-19, the seventh volume in the Democratic Marxism series, explores how many subaltern women – working class, peasant and indigenous – challenge hegemonic neoliberal feminism through their resistance to ordinary capitalist practices and ecological extractivism. Contributors cover women’s responses in a wide range of contexts: from women leading the defence of Rojava – the Kurdish region of Syria, to approaches to anti-capitalist ecology and building food secure pathways in communities across Africa, to championing climate justice in mining affected communities and transforming gender divisions in mining labour practices in South Africa, to contesting macro-economic policies affecting the working conditions of nurses. Their practices demonstrate a feminist understanding of the current systemic crises of capitalism and patriarchal oppression. What is offered in this collection is a subaltern women’s grassroots resistance focused on advancing and enabling solidarity-based political projects, deepening democracy, building capacities and alliances to advance new feminist alternatives.
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.
Chieftaincy has a chequered history in South Africa. Apartheid and colonial rule were accomplished in some part through traditional leadership, producing interesting speculations about the ...sustainability of this leadership in a post-apartheid era. Democracy’s requirement to determine leadership through elections seemed incompatible with traditional leadership’s ascendency through heredity lines. One of the more remarkable features of South Africa’s transition to democracy was the crafting of a political structure that incorporated traditional leadership into the post-apartheid, democratic state. In this way, traditional leadership proved itself resilient and flexible.
Research has insightfully explored the dynamics described above. Two schools of thought have
Traditional leadership DINEO SKOSANA
Traditional Leaders in a Democracy,
03/2019
Book Chapter
Now that traditional leadership has made its unexpected comeback in post-apartheid South Africa, how do we explain the ways in which the institution has kept itself relevant? This book has addressed ...the different operative modalities of traditional leaders in the current democratic system. The survival tactics that have been employed by traditional leaders range from distortions of the history and identity of the formerly colonised to claims to custodianship of ‘African culture’, resistance to colonialism and the emancipation of African people and finally to their strategic positioning at the centre of a booming mining economy in the former bantustans. The
At Tweefontein Colliery Complex, 25 km south-west of Witbank in Mpumalanga province, lie graves that will be impacted by multinational commodities and mining company Glencore PLC (Glencore) open-cast ...coal mine expansion plan. The Tweefontein farm, and several other farms such as Boschmansfontein and Klipplaat, are sites of formal and informal cemeteries with graves that belong to former migrant labourers and labour tenants from South Africa and Mozambique. The change of Glencore’s mining method from underground to open-cast mining disturbs about a thousand graves, which are legally protected by the National Heritage Resources Act, Act 25 of 1999 (NHRA). The negotiations
