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©
1992-2002 Wim van Binsbergen
1. Introduction[1]
In this paper, I shall draw attention to
background aspects of democracy and democratisation in two
African countries, Zambia and Botswana, by exploring not the
topical developments at the national political scene (a task for
which others are much better qualified), but the political
culture at the grassroots, to which my prolonged participant
observation as an anthropologist has given me access. Before we
arrive at the specific ethnography, I shall raise a number of
methodological and theoretical points without which, I feel, my
argument would remain in the air. This takes us (section 2) to a
discussion of democracy, globalization and the dangers of
Eurocentrism, and leads us to distinguish, in section 3, three
modes of defining democracy. Only after having identified
constitutional democracy as only one particular variant among
others, and as an item of political culture which has been
relatively recently introduced to Africa, we will discuss the
recent democratic positions and processes among the people of
Kaoma district, Zambia, and of the medium-sized town of
Francistown, Botswana. The purpose of the paper is, beyond a
descriptive one, to help define the wider setting and the
boundary conditions within which the more specific discussion of
the democratisation process in Africa since the late 1980s can be
situated; that discussion itself however, to which our African
colleagues have made such major contributions, remains outside my
present scope.[2]
2. Democracy,
globalization and possible Eurocentrism
Our social and political life is involved in
an ever accelerating process of globalization.[3] Through formal education and literacy, through
electronic media which in addition to spoken and written language
have developed their own lingua franca of images which is more of
less understood wherever there is media reception, and through
mass consumption whose trade flows spread, across the globe, the
silent language of standardised manufactured objects packed with
meanings, globalization has produced a situation where a fair if
varying percentage of the inhabitants of all continents are
familiar with and situationally adopt the global discourse, with
its particular selection of symbols and meaning. In the process,
the discourses specific to their local, regional and national
socio-cultural environments are far from lost, but are
situationally accommodated (with varying degrees of integration,
conflict, subordination or dominance) to the global discourse.
In the contemporary global discourse, ‘democracy’ has come to
occupy an important place. It often carries deep emotional
significance. It has acquired great mobilising power. In the
course of the twentieth century, many thousands of people have
been prepared to die in struggles legitimated by reference to
this symbol; many more people have admired others making such
sacrifices in the name of democracy, and have spurred them on.
Democracy has become a major export item of the USA and the NATO.
Ideologically (without denying the economic, power political,
religious and ethnic factors involved) that globalizing concept
of democracy was the force that breached the Berlin Wall and
exploded the communist empire of eastern Europe and North Asia.
The global percolation of media images documenting this process
has also contributed to the current democratisation movement in
many parts of Africa.
The social scientist or historian reflecting on this African
movement faces dilemmas that, phrased only slightly differently,
are only too familiar from the study of world religions, mass
consumption, styles of trade unionism, formal legislation by the
nation-state, cosmopolitan medicine, and so many other aspects of
the twentieth-century transformation of the African continent.
These dilemmas address the extent to which North Atlantic models
can acquire global relevance, and force us to explore the
limitations of both Eurocentrism (which claims only one model to
be valid) and cultural relativism (which claims all possible
models, including those found outside the North Atlantic, to be
equally valid and equally worth preserving for the future).
(1) The dilemma of cultural imperialism: is
the institution of democracy, which we have seen spreading all
over Africa, merely a submission to alien (for, North
Atlantic) forms which therefore will only fit like the
proverbial square peg in the round hole of African cultures and
societies; or is it, on the contrary, the awakening to a
universal heritage of mankind, which has outgrown its being
tied to a specific culture of origin (West European, North
American, or whatever), so that Africans adopting it are merely
coming into their own. In this light, the post-colonial
vicissitudes of democracy in Africa would not imply any
qualitative disability for democracy on the part of African
societies and their members, but would be equivalent to the (much
longer) formative stage of the same institution in the North
Atlantic region itself (see below).
(2) The dilemma of localisation: even
if considered global or universal, institutions invariably
develop a local form; who is to say whether that local form is a
regrettable deviation from abstract global standards?
(3) The dilemma of wrongly claimed
universality: given the distribution of economic and military
power in the modern world (a fundamental datum which the very
paradigm of globalization may be criticised for obscuring under a
illusion of cultural convergence and equality), could members
of a relatively powerful nation-state resist the temptation of
claiming that their own culture-specific institutions have in
fact supra-local, global relevance and truth? African
democratisation gains interest and support outside Africa since
it appears to liberate local African populations from the poor
constitutional and economic performance of the post-colonial
states in that continent. But if this amounts to furthering the North
Atlantic model of formal democracy (disguised as universal),
does it not at the same time imply the superiority of the North,
and reinforce the subordinative relations which have existed
between North and South since the nineteenth century? Could
democratisation mean that local African communities get rid of a
failing state, but at the same time are more effective subjugated
(ideologically, institutionally, and — since local democratic
performance is increasingly a consideration in intercontinental
donor relations — even economically) to unequal global power
relations under northern hegemony? Is that the hidden agenda of
the democratisation process?
(4) The social price of relativism: as
social scientists we can afford to take our distance from, for
instance, the Christianity or our ancestors (a North Atlantic
institution whose spread outside Europe is well comparable to
that of democracy), but we make ourselves unpopular and
politically suspect in our own socio-political environment if we
try to adopt the same stance with regard to democracy.[4] After all, who would not
hope (especially in a secularising world of fragmented meaning,
when absurdity has become the stock in trade of twentieth century
philosophy, art and literature) that such democratic principles
as human rights and general elections, far from being
culture-specific, would turn out to be universally applicable, to
be ‘true’? With the contestation by students and workers in
Western Europe and North America in the late 1960s, the semantics
of ‘democracy’ have moreover developed so as to include not
only the constitutional level of the nation-state, but also
participation, responsibility, initiative and competence in
one’s immediate micro-political environment (work-floor,
institutional (part?)organisation, urban residential area).
Democracy has become an important standard of evaluation for the
legitimate managing of all power relations in which we are
involved, and by implication for the propriety and meaning of all
social action. The production of knowledge about democracy
therefore is much more subject to social control (and thus far
more prone to Eurocentrism) than many other respectable fields of
cross-cultural social enquiry, for instance, concerning weaning
practices, conflict settlement in polygamous households, or
manuring techniques in peasant agriculture.
As an anthropological field-worker I have
participated for long periods, and with as much existential
commitment as I could summon, in four African societies[5] I was not born in, and
there I have often encountered — and have lived — principles
and procedures for the exercise of social power very different
from the democratic ideas of my home society (Dutch urban
society); in the latter however I consider myself a democrat.
Against this background I cannot offer easy solutions for the
dilemmas listed here. Meanwhile it is my contention that the
current discussion on democratisation in Africa sometimes runs
the risk of becoming myopic and Eurocentric in not paying
sufficient attention to the analytical and methodological
implications of cultural imperialism, localisation, wrongly
claimed universality, and the social price of relativism — all
of which are not exactly conducive to our objectivity as
analysts.
3. Three modes of
defining democracy
We also need to sharpen our conceptual tools
and bring them in historical perspective. Democracy is a number
of things at the same time, so that the term democratisation, as
the process of bringing about or enhancing democracy, may refer
to distinct and quite different phenomena. I propose to
distinguish three modes, designated A, B and C.
Philosophically, ‘democracy’ denotes a specific answer
to the question as to the source, within a collectivity of human
beings, of the legitimate exercise of power through legal and
political institutions: in the case of democracy, that source is
not a supernatural being, a king, an aristocracy, a specific
gender or age group, a priestly caste, a revealed unchangeable
text or shrine, but ‘the people’ (A). Statements about ‘the
people’ are sufficiently flexible and gratuitous to allow the
philosophical label of democracy to be applied in numerous
settings where in fact, through complex symbolic, ideological,
legal and military means, voluntary or forced representation and
usurpation have dramatically narrowed down the range of those who
actually exercise the power. Examples would include not only the
recently dismantled oligarchy of the German Democratic
Republic, but also classical Athens — where women, and (for
both sexes) slaves, children and youths, resident migrants
(metoikoi), and citizens banned to abroad, could not participate
in the ‘democratic’ proces.[6] After a succession of imperial, monarchical
and theocratic options in the course of two millennia, democracy
once more became the dominant legal-philosophical concept in the
European tradition, and was pruned of its biases of inequality,
in the North American Declaration of independence and
subsequently the French Revolution, in the eighteenth century;
the lists of basic human rights formulated in that context, still
constitute the basis for the legal philosophy of democracy today.[7]
What marked these developments since the Enlightenment was the
translation of the legal philosophy of democracy into
constitutional and organisational arrangements that stipulate, in
controllable and enforceable detail, the specific practical steps
through which the ideal source of power is translated into
concrete actions, offices, and personnel. It is these constitutional
arrangements, rather than their philosophical elaboration, which
have since characterised modern democracy. (B)
Direct democracy through a plenary meeting (for which a pro diem
was paid) with secret ballot was the ancient Greek formula at one
stage, and archaeologists have pondered over the potsherds and
the curious many-slotted stone slabs (anticipating our ballot
computers of today) used in the process. Plenary meetings with
formal voting procedures (or oath-taking, or other communication
methods aimed at consensus) were found in many other historic
societies, around the Mediterranean and beyond, organised on the
basis of relatively small-scale local communities. For instance,
the democratic thrust of the Dutch struggle for independence from
Spain in the sixteenth century derived inspiration not only from
philosophical, or rather theological, reflection on the ultimate
source of legitimate power by early Protestant thinkers, but also
from a much older tradition of village communities collectively
administering their irrigation works (polders and dikes).
It is important to appreciate the factor of scale. Village
communities conducive to direct political participation at the
local level still exist all over the world. Moreover, a broadly
comparable level of face-to-face interaction and ensuing direct
interests on a day-to-day basis is, paradoxically, found among
many members of urban mass society, in so far as these spend much
of their working and leisure time in relatively small operational
groups as defined within formal organisations and institutions
(schools, churches, factories, government departments, sport
clubs etc.); here the issues tend to be concrete and immediately
appealing, and the often informal structures for individual
participation in the decision-making process may take far greater
relevance, in the people’s consciousness, than the formal and
infrequently used constitutional arrangements for democracy at
the national level.
Contemporary mass society as organised in nation-states at the
national level no longer allows for direct democracy (although
the current state of technology would make this a dated position,
now that telephone lines and other electronic information
carriers capable of instantaneous two-way communication extend
into the majority of residential areas and even households). The
standard formula has of course become that of representative
delegation of ‘the power of the people’ through individual
secret ballot by each eligible citizen registered as a voter.
This is so much the accepted pattern that the organisation and
international inspection of general elections has become the test
par excellence of democracy; in discussions of
democratisation in Africa democracy is often equated with the
presence of these very specific formal requirements.
The lexical and philosophical roots of the concept of democracy
are far older than the specific accepted constitutional practical
arrangements of democracy. In current discussions about
democratisation in Africa we often forget that the
constitutional form of democracy as representative government
empowered through general elections is only a recent phenomenon
in the North, and had far from materialised in its present
form by the time of the Scramble for Africa which started the
colonial period. For most West European countries which
effectively colonised most of Africa as from the late nineteenth
century, the colonial period in part coincided, domestically,
with a prolonged struggle for democratic rights on the part of
the middle classes, workers, women, and youths.[8]
The constitutional rights (summed up by the maxim ‘one man
(person) one vote’) which Africans came to demand for
themselves in the 1950s, thus belong to a package of modernity
which, also in Western Europe, is twentieth century rather than
nineteenth, let alone earlier.
Meanwhile the formal constitutional model of democracy has
certain built-in features which would be self-defeating, unless
other, less formal additional arrangements come to its rescue.
For the distance between the voter and the resulting national
government under this model is so large, and the intervening
stages and procedures are so complex, that the constitutional
procedures of formal democracy may in themselves scarcely foster,
in the ordinary voters, a sense of political competence, of
actively shaping the present and future of their lives by
participating in the decisions that most affect them; or, if they
would still have such a sense of participation, it would often be
based on illusion.
The negative effects of this distance can however be reduced in a
number of ways, including:
— active participation in political
parties organised on a mass basis
— the development of a political culture
of information and accountability, where citizens are aware of
their constitutional rights and duties and where formal
constitutional rights and politicians’ performance are
effectively tested by independent courts
— the development, both in a formal
bureaucratic form and through networks of lobbying, canvassing
and opinion-making, of transparent links between the realms of
direct participation at the grassroots level (not necessarily in
political parties, but also in schools, churches, development
committees, tenants’ committees, co-operatives, union branches
etc.) and the national political centre. People do not
necessarily apply the same norms and procedures to (a) their
immediate day-to-day environment and (b) more distant national
issues, and whereas a rigid divorce between the local and the
national (in terms of political participation and identification)
would amount to withdrawal, disenchantment, estrangement, of
individuals vis-a-vis the political centre, a properly democratic
system would succeed in effectively linking the local and the
national.
— direct personal accessibility of those
in power through networks of patronage, nepotism, regionalism,
ethnicity and co-religionism; this is not exactly an option
stipulated by the global democratic model, but it happens to be
the only one that is found all over Africa
— the existence of an open and general
political discussion in the wider society, furthered by the
overall accessibility of the written and electronic media,
freedom of the press, widespread literacy, and a level of
affluence enabling people access to the media.
All this amounts to a comprehensive
political culture of democracy, which cannot be reduced to an
abstract legal formula ‘the source of all legitimate power is
the people’ (A), nor to the specific constitutional procedures
including general elections (B). Its essence would appear to be
that people actively and responsibly participate, and have the
sense of participating, in the major decisions that affect their
present and future, in such a way that they see their major
values and premises respected and reinforced, in a political
process that links the local and the national (C).
To sum up, we have identified a philosophical (A), a
constitutional (B) and a sociological (C) definition of
democracy. All three agree that democracy is ‘something of the
people’. As an anthropologist I flatter myself that I have
learned something of the ordinary life and the private world-view
of ‘the people’ who were my research participants; however,
working through participant observation in local settings of
face-to-face relations I have only obtained glimpses of the
national level to the extent to which that national level happens
to effectively interpenetrate and link up with the local level.
Since the 1970s anthropologists have struggled, and not vainly,
to incorporate the state and the global political economy into
their discourse; therefore, if from the local level the national
political centre becomes only visible in a fragmented and
problematic way, I submit that this is because the local/national
relations are in fact problematic in the local situations under
study, and not because anthropology has difficulty in addressing
such situations. All the same, while local/national relations wil
be highlighted in my discussion of democratisation among peasants
(generally identifying under the ethnic label of ‘Nkoya’)
from Kaoma district in Zambia’s Western Province (formerly
Barotseland), and among working-class townsmen (most of whom
identify ethnically as ‘Kalanga’ or as belonging to any of
the various Tswana groups, mainly ‘Ngwato’, ‘Kwena’,
‘Ngwaketse’, ‘Kgatla’) from Francistown, Botswana,[9] my actual research was
conceived in such a way that it does not enable me to make valid
general pronouncements concerning democratisation in these
countries at the national level.
But before we turn to the ethnographic detail there is one
more general hurdle to take. If constitutional democracy (B) has
sprung from the dynamics of the North Atlantic societies, how
must we visualise its reception in African societies? The current
wave of democratisation in Africa since the late 1980s appeals
to, and seeks to restore, constitutional rights and procedures
which allegedly have gone dormant under the failing performance
of the post-colonial nation-states. But when and how where they
planted on African soil in the first place?
4. Constitutional
democracy (B) as a recently introduced item of political culture
in Africa
At independence, African post-colonial
states emerged as the continuation of the bureaucratic apparatus
of the colonial state, but now increasingly staffed with African
personnel, and defined by a national constitution. The
constitution was, initially at least, highly reminiscent of that
of the former colonial metropole. The exercise of state power by
this bureaucratic apparatus was legitimated by constitutionally
well-defined patterns of popular participation through the
general franchise; in the background, the constitutional process
would be supported by international and intercontinental treaties
ensuring the post-independent nation-state of a respected place
among the world’s nations upholding fundamental human rights.
Usually these rights were specifically summed up in the
constitution.
The specific constitutional pattern thus stipulated in the new
nation-states of Africa in the 1960s could boast only a shallow
time depth on African soil. The roles, statuses, rights and
organisational forms, the concrete procedures of candidacy,
individual vote, loyal opposition etc., as defined by that
pattern, were alien to the indigenous structures of legitimate
political power which had prevailed in most parts of Africa
through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century; in
other words, the pattern was not in continuity with modes of
participation and legitimation which Africans from a village
background would spontaneously apply in their immediate
face-to-face social environment. If constitutional democratic
features were already part of the political culture of the
colonial metropole, the colonial state was built on the principle
that they should not be extended to the vast majority of African
‘subjects’.
How did this essentially alien and imported political culture
take root in the minds, actions and institutions of
twentieth-century Africans?
Conversion to world religions especially Christianity, the
concomitant access to literacy and formal education, and the
adoption of positions as workers, foremen and clerks within
capitalist relations of colonial production, made Africans share
in aspects of the same societal experience (in Africa like in the
North typically embedded within formal organisations: schools,
churches, mines, manufacturing enterprises, the police, the army,
local government) that had prompted the democratic process in the
North Atlantic region up to about half a century earlier.
The African experience was not just one of humiliation, although
there certainly was an infuriating amount of that. Participating
in a missionary organisation as an African evangelist, in a local
government structure as a boma (district administration)
messenger, in a school as a junior teacher, in a mine as a
driller or ‘boss-boy’, also involved (precisely while being
humiliated) learning about the exercise and manipulation of power
in a context of formal organisations; learning about an
impersonal legal authority that derived not from God or from
personal charisma through birth or achievement (e.g. kingship),
but from the abstract written word of law and regulation;
learning about rigid and intricate patterns of the organisation
of time and space which had come in the trappings of colonialism
and peripheral capitalism but which even more fundamentally
defined the twentieth-century societal experience both in the
North and in the South. In the latter part of the world they were
manifested in the layout of the residential space — segregated
in terms of ‘race’ and status — and the rhythm of time
between work and off-duty, Christian Sunday and secular weekday,
not to mention the legally defined periods of time involved in
the payment of poll tax, of notice when fired, and the
contractual spells of migrant labour. All this against the
background of a hidden premise of West European modernity (which
settlers and other colonialists struggled in vain to prevent from
seeping through to the colonised subjects): the human individual
as essentially equal to other individuals, i.e. as
interchangeable in a manner similar to manufactured products (and
workers) in the Industrial Revolution; but also, more positively,
in the sense that each human individual could be taken as
exemplary in the manner of biological species, chemical elements
and physical laws which post-Renaissance natural science had come
to define; essentially equal, despite differences in status and
power (related to class and race), and as equals converging
theologically in the original sin and the Christian salvation of
mankind according to the missionaries’ preachings; and, in a
secularising society increasingly organised along bureaucratic
lines, equal before the letter of impersonal legal authority.
Under the circumstances it could only be a matter of time until
such premises of equality were also applied in the constitutional
sphere, in the sense of universal franchise for Africans restored
to competence and initiative over the political and social
institutions that governed their lives.
In the struggle for de-colonisation and independence a crucial
role was played by varieties of self-organisation (trade
unions, political parties, welfare societies, burial societies,
rotating credit associations, ethnic and dancing groups,
women’s movements, and such churches as welcomed popular
participation and initiative) which were soon to be patterned
after the same model of formal organisation. Until quite late in
the colonial period, however, only a minority of the African
population was sufficiently deeply involved in imported
organisational structures to internalise the attitudes and values
that would make them into articulate democrats in the global,
constitutional sense.
The African independence movement of the 1950s was not only about
a vocal and educated African elite wrenching constitutional power
from the hands of the colonialists, but also about a broad
social transformation which, through communication,
mobilisation and mass organisation, made the tenets of
constitutional democracy come to life for large numbers of
Africans irrespective of their mode of livelihood, urban or rural
residence, level of education or religious creed. The leaders
of the struggle for independence were political brokers
canvassing for position, and planning a new nation-state; they
were also the prophets, at least temporarily honoured in their
own lands, of a brand-new democratic political culture.
They were not the only ones to offer a blueprint of a meaningful
and attainable future to African populations which had seen their
cosmologically structured, coherent universe fall apart in the
turmoil of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As pedlars
of meaning, organisational structure and restored competence
through effective action, the independence politicians with their
secular and constitutional message were in stark, often violent
competition, over their following among the African masses, with
witch-finders, prophets, church leaders, who locally or at a
grander scale offered their own interpretations of current misery
and future redress.[10] In
many of these attempts at symbolic or ritual salvation, there was
a large amount of bricolage, the various distinct movements
arriving at specific re-combinations of elements derived from the
traditional world-view as well as from Christianity. The
democratic movement around independence mainly sought to explore
the mobilising potential of the common men’s experiences of
peripheral capitalism and colonialism in the propagation of a
democratic and constitutional political culture which —
certainly in the 1950s — was West European far more than it had
already become localised and African; by contrast, the
religiously orientated alternatives to the democratic movement
showed far greater continuity vis-a-vis the ideological and
organisational orientation that had largely informed African life
in the nineteenth century, and that was still a formidable force
in the rural areas and in the kin networks of migrant workers in
town. From one point of view there was, between the various
political and ideological options at the time, a struggle for or
against continuity of the village-based traditional world-view;
from another, complementary viewpoint, various contesting
categories within the changing local society manipulated
alternative world-views so as to re-define the political and
economic interrelations between these social categories. Chiefs,
headmen, and elders in general derived much of their power over
young men and over women from a traditional world-view that made
these elderly men the main intermediaries between the villagers
and cosmological forces (ancestors, spirits of the wild, the High
God, royal spirits), and as such the indispensable mediators in
the relations (sexual, conjugal, judicial) even between young men
and women. For young men, particularly, this world-view hardly
answered the existential questions related to their experience as
migrant workers, and it denied such independence from elders as
they had aspired and often actually enjoyed at their distant
places of work; the youth’s adoption of new secular political
or Christian ideologies helped them to take a relative view of
the elders which had so far dominated their lives.[11]
Thus the continuity of a cosmologically anchored local world-view
with its own conceptions of legitimate political power and
procedure; the interaction between on the one hand traditional
leaders and, on the other, those of their subjects pursuing
modern careers outside the village settings; the prominence of
religious alternatives for the symbolic restructuring of local
society; the explicit formulation, and the transmutation, of
democratic political values in the mobilisation process of an
independence struggle; and the specific relations to develop
between local and national level at, and since, independence, —
all these would seem to be important factors in the production of
a democratic political culture in the global sense. With this in
mind, let us now turn to our two ethnographic examples.
5. Democracy versus
ethnicity in Kaoma district, Zambia
The dynamics of democracy and
democratisation in Kaoma district, Zambia, must be understood
against the background of its traditional and neo-traditional
political structure and its colonial experience.
The fertile, well-watered lands of Nkoya (now largely coinciding
with the Kaoma district, on the Zambezi/Kafue watershed, at
roughly the same latitude as Zambia’s capital Lusaka but 400 km
west) was the scene of dispersed communities of hunters,
fishermen and agriculturalists organised on a basis of localised
clans, when, from the middle of the 18th century, a number of
kingdoms emerged here under the influence of long-distance
trading opportunities and of political ideas derived from the
Lunda empire in southern Zaire. Around 1850 most of these
kingdoms became incorporated in the Kololo/Luyana state which has
since been known as Barotseland, with the Barotse or Lozi as
dominant ethnic group; Barotseland became the Protectorate of
Northwestern Rhodesia in 1900, and even after Zambia’s
independence maintained a special status within the new Republic
until 1969 (Caplan 1969). Under the Lozi king, whose official
title is Litunga, only two Nkoya royal titles (Mwene
Kahare and Mwene Mutondo) managed to survive through
the colonial period, as recognised and subsidised senior members
of the Lozi aristocracy.[12] Nkoya
traditional politics, concentrated on the Kahare and Mutondo
capitals, has displayed a highly articulate ceremonial culture,
involving, in addition to the royal family, a Prime Minister (Mwanashihemi),
other titled court officials including judges, and moreover court
priests, musicians, executioners and slaves (the latter two
statuses have been re-defined in recent times). Along with the
senior court officials, about a dozen senior village headmen
constituted the Mwene’s royal council, where[13] cases involving royal
and protocolary matters were handled, land was issued to locals
and strangers who so requested, and the Mwene’s
diplomatic relations with other Myene, with the Litunga, and the
colonial, subsequently post-colonial government were deliberated.
In exceptionally important situations (e.g. death of a Mwene
or election of a successor, the visit of a major outside
official, or cases involving witchcraft accusations of royals or
otherwise reflecting on the entire kingdom) the council’s
session would be held not in the Mwene’s audience hall
but outside, and then all subjects of the Mwene
(regardless of gender and age) had a right to attend, whereas
mature men (well over forty years of age) and — but rarely —
women of the same age group would take the floor, displaying
their skills at the formal Nkoya rhetoric. A strong sense of
protocol and procedure permeates Nkoya traditional politics and
constitutional law. The Mwanashihemi is usually co-opted
(by the Mwene and the royal council) from another kingdom
so as to ensure impartial application of these rules.
Political office is within the reach of many, and coveted. The
bilateral kinship system with endogamous tendencies makes lines
of descent frequently merge, so that kin groups are defined by ad
hoc micropolitical dynamics hinging on co-residence. It is
these kin groups of shifting composition which own titles of
kingship and village headmanship — the proper names or
praise-names of their ancestors — and whose senior male members
after secret deliberations confer a vacant title to a candidate
of their choice by a ritual of name inheritance called ushwana.
A honoured title as headman is therefore within the reach of
many men who live to attain middle age, and even the pool out of
which royal candidates could be selected used to be quite large
until under Lozi and colonial influence patrilineal descent was
imposed; but even so there are still a number of rival royal
candidates at every succession. And far from being considered
obsolete, the competition for offices as headman, senior headman
and Mwene is still very lively and sometimes (in a society
where poison and sorcery are commonplace) even deadly — these
offices have continued to represent the highest form of career
achievement, not only for those who have spent most of their
lives in the village but also for labour migrants who have
returned to the rural areas after living in town for decades and
attaining stable and even senior positions there.
The Mwene ultimately derives descent from the demiurge
Mvula, i.e. Rain,[14] and
while Mvula’s relationship vis-a-vis the High God Nyambi is not
totally clear, the kingship is explicitly legitimated by
reference to Nyambi’s status as the first Mwene and as Mwene
of the Sky. In terms of symbolic legitimation Nkoya kingship
presents a Janus face: on the one hand the Mwene
represents celestial beings and as such he is the incarnation of
the cosmic order on earth; on the other hand his office is
surrounded with connotations of sorcery and physical violence
which are absolutely abhorred in the context of Nkoya non-royal
village life. This presents an interesting puzzle for historical,
symbolic and theoretical analysis, but we cannot present the
details of its solution here (van Binsbergen 1992a, 1993c).
Suffice it to say that there is a notion of legitimate power (ngovu),
which is cosmologically anchored and of which the Mwene by
virtue of a very elaborate enthronement ceremony[15] is the central representative, but only in so
far as his actions remain within the dignity (shishemu) of
his office and are underpinned by the advice from the royal
council, which tends to be quite vocal. Mwene mwene na bantu:
‘a Mwene is Mwene by virtue of the people’, is
the Nkoya maxim. In addition to his title and regalia, followers
are the Mwene’s most important asset, and he is in
practice dependent upon public opinion for his continuation in
office. Just like the village headman, the king is dependent upon
his followers’ continued support (in the form of loyalty,
respect and residence within his realm; formerly also in the form
of tribute and tribute labour — a Mwene cannot engage in
productive labour and would starve to death without tribute —
as happened to the impeached Mwene Kashina in the mid-19th
century). Since people have latent rights of membership and
residence including use of land and other natural resources in a
number of villages beside the village of their actual residence,
a failing village headman sees the ranks of his followers dwindle
by their moving to different villages until the village may be
completely depleted; a failing royal Mwene may even be
killed by the senior councillors. Regicide, forced abdication and
impeachment of Myene are documented in the region’s history
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century; for fear of
being poisoned, no Mwene therefore would drink beer that
is not tasted first by a trusted kinswoman or cupbearer.
The Nkoya political system as it has existed since the eighteenth
century (incorporating many elements from a clan-based
pre-kingship system that is considerably older)[16] thus reflects interestingly on the three
definitions of democracy presented above. There is a notion that
high political office, however exalted a status and surrounded by
taboos separating the Mwene from his subjects, and however
underpinned by cosmological references, could not afford to
dissociate itself from the people (A). There was a pattern of
effective participation within the kingdom, in principle open to
all subjects but in practice usually delegated to senior headmen
and to mature men in general (C). But the constitutional
procedures stipulating the election to high office and the
exercise of power were completely different from those of the
global democratic model (B), and defined for mature men a
secluded realm of constitutional competence in a way which
(through the exclusion of youth and women) reinforced gender and
age cleavages in the local society.
Perhaps one would expect that such a historic political system
offered fertile ground for the adoption of the global democratic
model, also in terms of constitutional procedures. The opposite
however turned out to be the case, as is clear from developments
in this region in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Zambia was
involved in the struggle for independence.
For most Nkoya at the time, colonial rule was not much of an
issue. Incorporation in the global capitalist economy through
labour migration had started early (late 19th century), but until
well after independence it took the form of circulatory labour
migration which kept people’s social and conceptual dependence
on their rural society of origin largely intact; the Nkoya
(certainly those of the eastern Mashasha kingdom, that of Mwene
Kahare) hardly had an option, since until ca. 1950 they had very
little access to missionary education and therefore no basic
skills that might have launched them on a stable urban career.
The same lack of education particularly literacy made it
difficult for the global democratic model to transpire to them at
an early age. The imposition of colonial rule had reinforced the
hold of the Lozi indigenous administration in the region, and it
was the Lozi, far more than the British, who were perceived as
oppressors. The seething of protest and contestation throughout
the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the second half of
the colonial period, in the Nkoya region at first took the form
of symbolic reconstruction of society through witchcraft
eradication (which often had anti-Lozi overtones, and was
supported by the Myene), followed in the 1950s by an outbreak of
blatant sorcery practices (Reynolds 1964) as if new forms of
power, meaning and redress could only be found in the mystical
sphere and not in secular constitutional change. Only when
democratic independence pioneers in the centre of Barotseland
(the Wina brothers, Princes Nakatindi) turned out to challenge
the Lozi aristocratic establishment, the Nkoya became interested
in modern politics, but the Litunga managed to prevent the
registration (Mulford 1967) of a Nkoya branch of Mr H.
Nkumbula’s ANC — the Zambian independence party from which Mr
K. Kaunda’s ZANC (soon to be called UNIP) broke away in 1958. A
few Nkoya young men who meanwhile, against many odds, had managed
to get some formal education and had embarked on urban careers,
featured in the various political parties on the Northern
Rhodesian scene around 1960, some even started an ethnically
orientated, but abortive party called Mankoya Fighting Fund, and
in the first general elections the Nkoya massively supported
UNIP, but still the issue as perceived by the Nkoya was anti-Lozi
far more than in favour of independence and constitutional
democracy. When at independence the Lozi turned out to have
occupied powerful positions in regional and national government,
while not a single Nkoya operated at these levels, and when
moreover the UNIP government stopped labour migration to Zimbabwe
and South Africa which had been the Nkoya’s main source of cash
for many decades, the interest in modern politics dissipated
entirely, and the Nkoya withdrew within the confines of the
neo-traditional local politics.
During my first fieldwork in the region in the early 1970s, it
was shocking to see how little the local population considered
themselves to be part of post-independent Zambia. Zambia was the
name for a country ‘out there’, along the ‘Line of Rail’
that crosses Zambia from north to south and along which its towns
were concentrated. The principles and procedures of Zambia’s
constitutional organisation seemed largely unknown among most
villagers, and commanded even less loyalty. Democratic voting
procedures were considered morally and cosmologically obscene,
for implying that political office could be bought for promises,
favours and money rather than being a high responsibility
entrusted to the best candidate on the basis of the elders’
secret deliberations, and the legitimating ushwana
installation ceremony which guaranteed ancestral support for the
new incumbent. Incorporation in the wider world had so far only
produced a conceptual boundary vis-a-vis that world, not a sense
of wider relationships and responsibilities, let alone a new
sense of power and competence at the national level. Even the
Kaoma district centre, with its administrative and judicial
offices and UNIP headquarters, was an alien place, were no Nkoya
occupied any position in the political and administrative
hierarchy above messenger, driver or cleaner; Nkoya were also
conspicuously absent among local entrepreneurs. Paradoxically,
the most conspicuous local link with the UNIP government was in
the person of Mwene Kahare, whose subtle manoeuvring in
the struggle for independence had gained him the honour of being
nominated a party Trustee. Besides, he was made a member of the
national House of Chiefs, and although this did not give him any
tangible power at the national level, it gave his subjects in the
rural areas the illusory satisfaction that when their Mwene
was summoned to Lusaka he went there, using government transport,
in order to rule Zambia! Lozi oppression was felt to continue as
before independence, and there was widespread nostalgia for the
blessings of the colonial period, when blankets and clothing had
been cheap and migrants’ cash earnings had not been subject to
income tax at source.
In the early 1970s, a local branch of UNIP existed nominally but
it was virtually invisible at the village level. Rather more
visible was a UNIP Youth branch, largely composed on sons and
clients of senior headmen who were the Mwene’s main
rivals with regard to traditional office. With very little
feedback from national and regional headquarters, the Youths’
activities consisted not in political instruction or
mobilisation. At the time when UNIP Youths elsewhere in Zambia
created havoc with their violent card-selling and card-checking
practices, the Nkoya Youths made themselves occasionally useful
as a work-force for communal projects (emulating a historic
pattern of tribute labour). They were particularly conspicuous
when they organised a mass trial where Mwene Kahare and
his staff were accused of the kind of ritual murder that had
always been part and parcel of the kingship. In the process the
Youths presented a list of demands that, if implemented, would
have made them the de facto authorities in the kingdom.
This challenge of the traditional establishment misfired
(ultimately the Mwene, subsidised and officially gazetted,
had much more backing from the outside world than the self-styled
UNIP Youths), but what is particularly revealing is that the
Youth’s attack was completely inward-looking and failed to
adopt the idiom of the national democratic model. The Mwene,
on his part, could not convert his basic loyalty to the UNIP
government and the post-colonial state into political education
for his subjects, since his relationship with his subject was
determined by constitutional principles which were totally alien
to the global democratic model.
The Nkoya participated in the struggle for independence on the
basis of their own ethnic priorities, and did not yet massively
learn about constitutional democracy in the process. Thus the
first opportunity, around independence, of turning the Nkoya into
participants in the national democratic process, was almost
completely lost. But not quite. I have passed over the urban
experience of Nkoya migrants at the time. In the second half of
the 1960s, Zambian towns were in the throes of conflict between
ANC and UNIP, which was only resolved by the creation of the
second Republic, under UNIP, in December 1971.[17] Nkoya urban residents had participated in
this process as inhabitants of urban residential areas siding
with one particular party, as street fighters etc., but only a
handful of them had actually taken up office in either political
organisation and thus had been exposed to the inner
organisational structure and procedures of the democratic
process. One of them, Mr. J. Kalaluka, had even stood as an ANC
parliamentary candidate in the 1968 elections, but had lost. The
forced amalgamation between ANC and UNIP enabled him to be a UNIP
candidate in the 1973 elections, and then he became the MP for
Kaoma East. Especially when within a few years he managed to add
a ministerial post to his seat in parliament, the Nkoya had
finally found the link to the centre that was to teach them how
to appreciate and make use of modern constitutional forms.
Three additional factors facilitated this process: the Lozi’s
decline at the national level, successful rural development in
Kaoma district, and the Nkoya’s ethnic self-organisation.
(a) In 1969 President Kaunda had terminated
the special status of the former Barotseland within the Republic
of Zambia, and the 1970s saw the decline of Lozi power at the
national level; in the process, the President and his
administration missed few opportunities to curry favour with the
Nkoya.
(b) In 1971, moreover, the powerful
parastatal Tobacco Board of Zambia had initiated a major
development scheme in the eastern part of Kaoma district. Few
local villagers could lastingly benefit, as tenants, from the new
opportunities this scheme offered, and the farms were largely
occupied by ethnic strangers. Yet within fifteen years the very
sparsely populated forest turned into a rural town of nearly
20,000 inhabitants, Nkeyema, with schools, clinics, a thriving
UNIP party branch, etc. (Nelson-Richards 1988). For a number of
political brokers of Nkoya background, including Mr Kalaluka, the
scheme offered both personal economic advancement and a platform
for active mobilisation along ethnic and regional lines. Here,
for the first time, UNIP songs and the Zambian national anthem
were sung in the Nkoya language, whose legitimate existence had
so far been denied by the Lozi and the central state. Nkoya
gradually awoke to the idea that the modern state and its
institutions were not necessarily inimical, neither the ethnic
identity they had developed in the context of Lozi incorporation,
nor to the kingship that had become the central expression of
that identity. While Zambia as a whole saw a period of steady
economic decline in the second half of the 1970s and throughout
the 1980s, the relative economic situation in what had
used to be a stagnant labour reserve, Kaoma district, began to
look less bleak. Realising that the state had little to offer,
economically, beyond the mixed blessings of the Nkeyema Scheme,
Nkoya/state contacts increasingly concentrated on an immaterial
deal: the exchange of the Nkoya citizen’s loyal support and
participation, for state recognition and consolidation of their
ethnic identity and traditional leadership.
(c) This process was formalised when in the
early 1980s, after diffuse preparations as from the mid-1970s, a
few middle-class urbanites from a Nkoya background founded the
Kazanga Cultural Association. This society has since linked urban
and rural sections of Nkoya life, particularly through the
organisation, since 1988, of the annual Kazanga cultural
festival, where the Zambian state has always put in an appearance
through a delegation at ministerial level. The festival (one of
the five of its nature in the country, to be announced and
reported on Zambia television) is an enormous source of pride to
the Nkoya, and generates all sorts of further activities and
innovations in the cultural, organisational and economic fields.
As a result of these developments over the past twenty years, the
Nkoya people of Kaoma district have become far more effectively
incorporated in the post-colonial state. The misery, bitterness,
indignation and estrangement from the state under the Kaunda
administration, which marked the 1980s for particularly the urban
populations of Zambia, were here attenuated, somewhat by the
rural economic opportunities, but to a much larger extent by the
ethnic revival the people went through, which restored a sense of
meaning and competence to their rich cultural life, and created
contexts in which this heritage was no longer self-consciously
cherished and fossilised within a local universe increasingly
sealed off from an inimical outside world, but could be
communicated to that outside world, in forms (particularly media
coverage) which have great prestige in that outside world, and
which generate further innovation.
Interesting innovations are now taking place in the kingship. In
the early 1970s the Nkoya neo-traditional court culture was
marked by a rigid splendour. The emphatic maintenance of
nostalgic historic forms of protocol and symbolic, particularly
musical, production (which no longer corresponded with any real
power invested in the kingship under conditions of incorporation
by the Lozi indigenous state and by the colonial and
post-colonial central state) reflected the fact that the need for
boundary maintenance vis-a-vis the outside world was at its peak.
All this now strikingly contrasts with the laxity of court life
today. It is as if the focus of articulation of Nkoya ceremonial
court culture has now shifted from the day-to-day protocol at the
secluded traditional capitals controlled by traditional
councillors, to the annual public performance at the Kazanga
festival, before central-state dignitaries and a massive audience
of spectators, and controlled by the Kazanga association
executive. Of course, the kingship, based on a local vision of
the political and cosmological order, could only lose out when
the subjects came to participate more effectively and
whole-heartedly in a national democratic order based on very
different constitutional principles. However, at the same time a
fervent reconstruction process is going on, where the Kazanga
Cultural Association effectively negotiates between the state,
the kingship and the villagers, insisting on a new symbolic and
ceremonial role for all four[18] Nkoya kings together along lines which are
all bricolage and at variance with established historical
patterns, but which do result in restoring the kings to a level
of emotional and symbolic significance perhaps unprecedented in
twentieth century Nkoya history. During the 1992 Kazanga
festival, Mwene Kahare Kabambi, who used to be a somewhat
pathetic, stammering figure dressed in a faded suit with ragged
shirt collar, appeared covered in leopard skins and with a
headband adorned with regal zimpande (Conus shells), and
formidably brandishing his royal axe and broadsword, and after
drinking from the sacred pit with beer made of the year’s first
harvest, for the first time in living memory performed the kutomboke
royal solo dance which kept the audience breathless and moved
them to tears; after his death in 1993, his successor Mwene
Kahare Kubama kept up this pattern at the 1994 festival.
Having greatly invested in the UNIP administration in the last
decade, and feeling that they had been given a fair deal, the
Nkoya were certainly not in the forefront of Mr Frederick
Chiluba’s Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD), when this
materialised in 1990 out of the political contestation against
the utterly failing Kaunda administration. Even though Mr
Kalaluka had lost his parliamentary seat, and hence his
ministerial post, in the 1987 elections to a non-Nkoya contender
from Kaoma district, the links to the political centre had become
sufficiently open, and the sense of political competence
sufficiently developed, to take a maturely democratic stance.
Recalling the lack of democratic knowledge and attitudes which I
found in the area in 1973, I am now amazed by the ease with which
ordinary villagers, men and women, talk about the national
political issues of today, and define their own position within
what is essentially a democratic constitutional framework. I
grant that a considerable part of the credit must go to the
inspiration of the democratic movement which swept over Zambia
since the late 1980s; but this would have fallen into completely
infertile ground, had not a gradual process of Nkoya/state
accommodation over the 1970s and 1980s, under UNIP, already
turned the people into democrats with a realistic national
outlook. One recognised the unmistakable need for change, and was
prepared to give majority support even to parliamentary
candidates (such as Mr Mandande and Mr Tumbila, the present MMD
MPs for the district) who were new men both at the national and
the regional level, and of whom the former did not even qualify
nor identify as Nkoya. Realising that the Nkoya group had come to
carry a certain weight at the national and regional level, the
political and symbolic brokers that make up the Kazanga
association’s executive lost no time to trade Nkoya support for
organisational and logistic facilities under the new government.
Needless to say that the promise of innovation and restoration
which constitute MMD’s main appeal tied in very well with the
local reconstruction the Nkoya were already involved in on their
own impetus; again, however, the crucial inspiration appears to
have been local and ethnic rather than national and democratic
— but now at least within a framework of open and viable
local/national relations.
However, the Nkoya have learned not to put all their apples in
one basket. Only a few months before the elections of October
1991 (cf Sichone 1991-92; Baylies & Szeftel 1992) which
brought Mr Chiluba’s victory and Mr Kaunda’s political
demise, the latter had personally intervened in an attempt by the
Litunga[19] to
downgrade or even abolish the kingships of Kahare and Mutondo.
Perhaps somewhat alarmed by the prominence, in MMD, of Lozi
politicians such as Mr Arthur Wina and Mr Akashambatwa
Mbikusita-Lewanika (both of which have since left MMD, however),
established Nkoya community leaders meanwhile, both in modern and
traditional office, tended to continue siding with UNIP, and even
after Mr Chiluba’s installation as President of Zambia massive
UNIP rallies have continued to be held in Kaoma district, with
Nkoya party officials in prominent positions. Of course, this is
as expected under a multi-party democracy, and it is regrettable
that, barely one and a half years after the change-over (April
1993), the first UNIP activists had to be made political
prisoners in MMD Zambia. Most recently, the National Party’s
success in Western Province as a whole, at the expense of MMD, is
also reflected in Kaoma district, and without destructive
friction the national and regional executive of the Kazanga
association continues to encompass the various party-political
options such as exist at the national level. Local ethnic
reconstruction continues to take precedence over national party
allegiance.
The nature of my data does not allow me to make pronouncements
about MMD and the recent democratisation process in general at
the national level (cf. Mudenda 1992). My story about one ethnic
group in one rural district should not be misread to imply an
interpretative pattern for Zambia as a whole, or for rural Zambia
as a whole. Not having started the post-colonial period with a
great deal of knowledge and illusions about the democratic
constitutional process and of their own role therein, having
fared much better under UNIP than could be expected, and tapping
a source of revitalisation at the local ethnic rather than the
national democratic level, the Nkoya could scarcely muster the
great sense of frustration and anger that characterised the
seasoned trade unionists, politicians and intellectuals at
MMD’s centre (cf. Mbikusita-Lewanika & Chattel 1990;
Kamwambe 1991).
The Nkoya story is only a footnote to the specific recent history
of the MMD in Zambia. But it suggests that MMD in itself cannot
be understood unless against the background of the total, and
uneven, picture of the emergence of a global democratic political
culture in Zambia, a process in which traditional leadership,
religious alternatives, and local/ national relations constitute
important dimensions.
6. Glimpses of democracy
in Francistown, Botswana
From this point in my argument, and from
Zambia, it is only a short step to a neighbouring country which
appears to have remained untouched by the African democratisation
movement of recent years, notably Botswana. If the Nkoya case in
Zambia brings out regional politics, ethnic reconstruction and
the partial survival of a local, ancient political culture as
limiting conditions to the reception of the North Atlantic
democratic model, the Botswana case would suggest further
boundary conditions to lie in the quality of the state’s
economic performance, and in the ideological construction of a
sense of historic continuity in the local political culture, so
that the state elite can pose as emulating, rather than providing
an alternative to, political traditions as perceived by the
state’s ordinary citizens.
Botswana is a most interesting among African countries, since
to the outside world it has presented the image of one of the
very few African democracies that have survived intact since
independence; moreover it is one of the few African economies
that have avoided the stagnation so common in the continent
during the 1970-1980s. So the most obvious answer to the question
as to why there is no conspicuous democratisation movement in
Botswana, would seem to be: ‘because no further democratisation
is needed — the country is a viable democracy and the state
delivers what the citizens expect’.
My research in Botswana’s second largest town, Francistown,
since 1988, has however convinced me that this answer is only
partially correct. The Botswana state does deliver, albeit far
from lavishly, and in ways which (as the Batswana[20] workers often complain)
compares poorly with the income situation and standard of living
in neighbouring South Africa, with which many Batswana are
familiar from labour migration, personal contacts and the media.
At the same time, Botswana is far from a totally convincing
democracy.[21]
The political scene is dominated by the ruling Botswana
Democratic Party (BDP); of the handful of other parties, only the
Botswana National Front (BNF) and Botswana People’s Party (BPP)
are sufficiently organised to win a few parliamentary seats in
the general elections, which are regularly held at five-year
intervals, for the last time in 1989. The weakness of the
opposition is not due to lack of politicians of great
capabilities, but to lack of funds (whereas the ruling party is
at least logistically facilitated by the government),
fragmentation, a low degree of grassroots organisation, and the
circumstance that the ruling party’s powers of co-optation and
appeal for peace and unity cut across political boundaries. Among
the tactics which the ruling party uses in order to perpetuate
its position of dominance, are the appointment of additional
members of elected political bodies whenever the opposition
threatens to take a majority, and persuading opposition members
to cross the floor to the ruling party (a case in point is the
Francistown Town Council in 1987). Another strategy is that of
postponing the implementation of unpopular decisions such as the
demolition of a squatter area until after elections, especially
if the area in question has a high proportion of BDP supporters.[22] A related and even more
general strategy is securing public support in exchange for such
facilities as the state (controlled by the ruling party) has to
offer: junior secondary schools, clinics, boreholes. Comparable
is the government’s handling of many millions of Pulas[23] of arrears incurred in
the country’s ambitious and praiseworthy Self-Help Housing
Association (SHHA) programme: on the basis of repayable loans and
monthly service levies, this programme provided adequate,
occupant-owned housing for tens of thousands of town dwellers,
but until well after the 1989 general elections the BDP
administration chose not to take legal action concerning the
arrears for fear of estranging the vast majority of beneficiaries
that had run into often very considerable arrears.
The electronic media in Botswana are government-controlled and so
is the only daily newspaper; there are however a number of
private weekly periodicals which maintain considerable
independence from the ruling party. The Botswana constitution
(Republic of Botswana 1983) guarantees the usual human rights,
and its extensive limiting clauses in the interest of peace and
order are fairly standard by comparison to other constitutions.
In practice these clauses mean e.g. that people are not allowed
to use any languages other than English and Tswana in court and
parliament (although about 30% have other languages as their
mother-tongue), and that hardly any periodicals or books in these
languages are published, partly because one is under the
impression that this would be illegal. The use of the private
printing press is subject to a license which every printer is at
pains not to forfeit.
‘Freedom squares’, open spaces set aside for public meetings
of a political nature, exist in every residential area and
village and are open to whatever political party applies for a
permit to use them, but all political meetings taking place there
are attended by uniformed police who tape the proceedings. There
are no political prisoners in Botswana, but individuals who
during questioning time at such meetings brought up awkward
issues have occasionally been known to be taken for questioning.
Similarly, opposition politicians and ethnic activists have opted
for careers of self-employment in the awareness that they are
likely to be penalised by a Berufsverbot if they would
pursue their activities from a position as civil servant, teacher
etc. In places like Francistown where a garrison is stationed,
and especially in border areas, people have learned to fear the
soldiers, whose conduct is not always subject to the kind of
sanctioning one would expect under the rule of law.
With the rapid post-Independence quantitative expansion of
education, and the existence of oppositional politics since the
1960s, constitutional knowledge is considerable among educated
and middle-class circles. However, among the general public the
level of democratic awareness and actual political participation
including voting are low. Certainly in Francistown the majority
of the population would give the impression of taking the
government for granted, even in the de facto one-party
form it has assumed in Botswana, without taking great interest
and, especially, without being keen on change.
Here I refer to the distinction I earlier made between
national-level political participation and immediate democracy at
the grassroots level of village, urban residential area,
workplace, school etc. Batswana, both in town and in villages, do
take a keen interest in their immediate social environment, and
actively seek to structure it through organisation and
participation. The social environment need not coincide with the
direct physical environment, and often extends far beyond. In
newly-settled residential areas many people find it difficult to
establish flourishing dyadic, informal ties with the strangers
that happen to have become their neighbours, but they actively
maintain ties with people from their home village, their ethnic
group, their church and their workplace (van Binsbergen 1991,
1993a). And whenever dyadic relations can be embedded in a
lasting collective organisational setting involving a number of
people on a more or less permanent, formal and predictable basis,
Batswana show great eagerness and creativity in the pursuit of
public responsibility. Voluntary associations (especially
independent churches and sport associations) are a dominant
feature of social life, not only in towns but also in rural
areas. The model of serious and candid consultation between
equals informs the pattern of interaction at the village assembly
(kgotla), where basis values of sociability, respect, and
inclusiveness are brought out in a way which makes proceedings
take on a social significance far exceeding that of the
adjudication of petty individual cases. So much is the kgotla
model the standard for ideal social behaviour, that it is
immediately emulated whenever the diffusion of information, the
need to arrive at a decision, or the settlement of a conflict
necessitates the appeal to a common framework of interest and a
shared model of action: in family matters, on the work-floor, in
formal organisations, etc. In these contexts the everyday rhythm
of activities including the bureaucratic division of labour and
group boundaries are time and again punctuated by informal,
impromptu but extremely effective ceremonies of consultation
which are the hallmark of Botswana political culture. For
Batswana, the test of appropriate public behaviour, decision
making and ‘democracy’ lies in principle in this type of
practical consultation, far more than in the remote letter of any
modern or traditional constitutional legislation.
As such, the kgotla model, as pivotal in the national
culture, provides a welcome instrument in the hands of the
Botswana state elite seeking to legitimate and perpetuate its
position of power. Emphatic public reference to and artificial
emulation of the kgotla model can produce, in the mind of
common Batswana, a sense of historic continuity and legitimation
where in fact there is discontinuity, transformation and
unchecked elite appropriation of societal power. The skilful
manipulation of the kgotla model in Botswana thus produces
what we might designate, somewhat floridly, as ‘populist
authoritarianism through symbolic engineering’. Today,
proceedings at village dikgotla and especially at Urban
Customary Courts are claimed to be in accordance with the
time-honoured kgotla model which — as the elite never
tires of reminding the population — is at the heart of the
Botswana tradition; but in fact uniformed police officials and
clerks have appropriated the judicial process even at the village
level, and even more so in town, where no cross-examination by
ordinary members of the public is allowed, the slim volume of the
Penal Code is applied rigidly and mechanically without
reference to customary law even in the latter’s codified form,
and where sessions are even closed to the public. By the same
token, the open-air Freedom Squares and the political meetings
which the ruling party and its weak rivals organise there emulate
the kgotla pattern, so much so that people may take their
own traditional kgotla stools there for seats, or make
shift with rocks; but we have seen how the actual proceedings
during these meeting greatly deviate from the spirit of the kgotla
pattern. More examples could be cited from, e.g., the sphere of
traditional leadership (where the chiefs — dikgosi, of
old the central figures at dikgotla — have been turned
into salaried petty officials), or the state’s authoritarian
management (through the Registrar of Societies) of people’s
self-organisation in voluntary associations (van Binsbergen
1993b). In these fields, and many more, the same elite-engineered
suggestion of cultural continuity in combination with
authoritarian state control along the lines of a non-traditional
bureaucratic logic can be pin-pointed.
In the Zambian Nkoya case traditional rulers, the Myene,
appeared as original foci of a local political culture which,
while allowing for certain forms of sociological democracy (C),
could not and would not be reduced to the globalizing idiom of
constitutional democracy along North Atlantic lines (B), — so
that the trajectory of democratisation in that context revolved
on the process of interplay between a local and a global
political models, each accommodating to, and reinforcing rather
than annihilating the other. In the Botswana case the situation
is very different (Gillett 1973; Roberts 1972; Silitshena 1979).
The kgotla pattern does imply the role of the traditional
ruler, whose co-ordinating presence structures the kgotla
proceedings, leads them to a conclusion, and legitimates them
with the mystical sanctions of his office. Under indirect rule, dikgosi
did continue to be the principal conspicuous political
authorities in Bechuanaland throughout the colonial period, and
since independence (1966) the post-colonial state has derived
much of its authority in the eyes of its citizens from the skill
with which it has encapsulated the dikgosi. In many ways
it would be true to say that the central state is felt by its
subjects to be the legitimate heir to the dikgosi.
Besides, the BDP was founded by Sir Seretse Khama, heir apparent
to a major royal title (that of the Ngwato), and son of the
internationally famous kgosi Khama III. In other words, in
the Botswana case we do not find a dynamic juxtaposition between
local tradition and globalizing modern state structure, but the
selective subjugation, appropriation and manipulation of local
tradition by the state elite.
Some impression of political attitudes and behaviour can be
gleaned from the following selected results of a questionnaire
survey I conducted in Francistown in 1989.[24] The relevant questions as presented here were
embedded in a far more extensive questionnaire dealing with
household composition, social contacts, economic activities,
health behaviour, sexuality, media consumption and church life;
this resulted in highly personal in-depth interviews each
extending over several hours, where every care was taken to keep
response artefacts to a minimum.
(a)
Did you register as a voter? yes (73%) /no (27%) — more than
one quarter of the respondents claim not to have registered as a
voter, although less than one tenth did not qualify for reasons
of age and citizenship.
(b)
Which party do you support? none (10%) /BDP (43%) /BPP (27%) /BNF
(20 %) — barely two fifths of the respondents claim to
support the ruling party BDP, although in the 1989 elections the
BDP carried as many as 7 of the 11 Francistown wards[25]
(c)
What do you think about the following statements:
1. ‘In a democratic country like Botswana, every citizen is
free to form a new political party and to try and get the
majority vote.’ agree (76%) / don’t know (11%) / disagree
(13%) — as many as one quarter of the respondents turn out
not to know their basic political rights
2. ‘Botswana would be better off if the chiefs get the powers
back they had before independence’. agree (36%) / don’t know
(22%) / disagree (42%) — only one third of the respondents
claim to be dissatisfied with chiefs’ position in
post-independent Botswana, whereas many more approve of the
current situation in which the state has effectively appropriated
chiefs’ powers
3. ‘It is sinful to criticise the government of Botswana.’
agree (35%) / don’t know (21%) / disagree (44%) — more
than one third of the respondents hold the view that it is
morally wrong to criticise the government
4. ‘It is all right to break the laws of the government as long
as you are not found out.’ agree (18%) / don’t know (9%) /
disagree (73%) — three quarters of the respondents give
evidence of having fully internalised the state’s authority
5. ‘The government of Botswana makes sure that nobody needs to
go without food, clothing, shelter, education and medical
services’ agree (49%) / don’t know (12%) / disagree (39%) —
nearly half of the respondents claim that the Botswana state
takes excellent care of its citizens, although almost two-fifth
are of the adverse opinion
6. ‘The people who talk about Apartheid and oppose the
political system of South Africa, are just trouble-makers’
agree (37%)/ don’t know (12%)/ disagree (51%) — more than
one third of the (Black) respondents reject the anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa, most probably — cf. statement (3) —
because political contestation is abhorred no matter how
justified the cause[26]
7. ‘Our traditional culture is just a thing of the past — it
must disappear and be replaced by the international culture which
we see on TV, in the magazines, and from the expatriates.’
agree (21%) / don’t know (13%) / disagree (66%) — two
thirds of the respondents claim to insist on cultural continuity
between the past and the future.
(d) Do you know your ward councillor personally? yes (55%) / no
(45%) — more than half of the respondents claim to know
their ward councillor personally; this official acts as a
reference when applying for the application of a self-help
housing plot, but is hardly involved in informal conflict
regulation between residents at the ward level
What these responses suggest (but of course far more data and
analysis are needed in order to substantiate this point) is that
— at least at one level of formal and normative consciousness,
such as transpires in formal survey interviews — the average
urban Motswana view even the post-colonial state not as a
structure of democratic negotiation which is ultimately empowered
and controlled by himself or herself, but as a sacrosanct outside
entity, which nurtures and protects but should not be challenged,
and which is essentially in continuity with the colonial and
pre-colonial past.
This conception of the state as beyond civil control and
criticism is even projected onto neighbouring South Africa, and
that at a time when, with Mr Mandela still imprisoned, nothing
hinted at the splendid democratic developments which have taken
place in that country since 1990. The migratory exposure to South
Africa has had a tremendous impact on Botswana life in the course
of the twentieth century. It did certainly produce a political
effect: the country’s first political parties were founded in
Francistown by returning migrants deeply involved in the South
African ANC (Murray et al. 1987; Nengwekhulu 1979); the
Kalanga-orientated BPP retains that inspiration, but (at least in
terms of actual election results) locally it has largely lost out
to the populist, Tswana-orientated BDP which claims continuity
(through the national language Tswana, for which a considerable
price of international cultural isolation is paid) with the
‘Botswana traditional culture’, and dissimulates social
contradictions under an ideology of peace and progress. Church
independency, and the political acquiescence and aloofness it has
implied at least for ordinary churchgoers[27] throughout Southern Africa, proved a more
significant, if negative, South African export item from a
democratic point of view.
In such a setting, who will go out of his way to clamour for more
democracy at the national level, than a skilfully manipulated
traditional (but illusory) model like that of the kgotla,
can provide?
In the final analysis, meanwhile, it may not be the pretended
continuity (through language, the kgotla model, the
encapsulation of traditional authorities etc.) with the past and
with notions pertaining to the handling of power in face-to-face
settings, which explains the majority’s lack of interest in
greater democratisation in Botswana at the national level, but
the internal contradictions within the package of globalisation
that has come to control Botswana today more than any other
African country of my acquaintance with the exception of South
Africa. As one would expect in a country under South African
hegemony, like Botswana, not political participation along
democratic lines, but mass consumption along incipient class
lines represents the part of the global culture which has the
greatest appeal to Batswana today. Probably this selection partly
reflects a concern with wealth, its circulation and accumulation,
which was built into the pastoral economy and the patrilineal
kinship system long before the advent of colonialism and
capitalism; many centuries ago, the great Zimbabwe and Torwa
state systems that once encompassed part of Botswana, already
thrived on the circulation of wealth (Tlou & Campbell 1984).
When consumption within a cash economy has become a basic
standard of self-esteem and social prestige, as is very clearly
the case in urban Botswana today, one would hardly expect to
encounter democratic initiative and courage to a level higher
than that found in the North Atlantic region today — where the
dampening effect of affluence on radical political attitudes has
been the subject of a considerable literature.
The Batswana’s fundamental satisfaction with the material
performance of the post-independence state must be an important,
perhaps even crucial factor explaining their lack of contestation
and the absence of a recent democratisation movement. The
dynamics of the prevailing political culture would then appear to
be a very significant additional factor: it engenders political
acquiescence and dissipates foci of contention within the civil
society, by producing the suggestion of cultural continuity
between actual state performance, and popular notions of
legitimate power hinging on the kgotla model which in fact
in only a manipulated neo-traditional facade for an authoritarian
elite state based on-participation.
7. Conclusion
I have stressed that the global model of
democracy is a very specific, and far from universal, form of
political culture, which needs to be learned before it can be
expected to be applied, and which operates in the context of
alternative, more indigenous views of participation, legitimation
and constitutional procedure. In order to appreciate the
substantial local variations within this process, national-level
analyses can be fruitfully complemented with anthropological
insights in the way people structure their local political
life-worlds and interpret globalizing national politics within a
particularist local framework of expectations and concerns. The
democratisation movement in Africa since the late 1980s is often
portrayed as the return to a model of national democracy that
allegedly was already there at national independence but that had
merely been eroded or become dormant in subsequent years; my
argument, selectively based on ethnographic evidence from the
grassroots level in two very different contemporary situations in
Southern Africa, suggests however that the democratisation
movement is only another phase in the ongoing political
transformation of Africa, in the course of which, by an interplay
between local and national (ultimately global) conceptions of
political power, indigenous constitutional, philosophical and
sociological alternatives for political legitimacy are tested,
accommodated or discarded as obsolete. The capricious and
contradictory outcomes of this process at the local level need to
be taken into account, particularly by those who hope that the
modern democratic model can yet transcend its North Atlantic
origins and become the cornerstone of a new and better world.
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[ insert diagram 1]
Diagram 1. South Central and Southern Africa
[1] ©
1994 — Wim van Binsbergen, Haarlem, The Netherlands
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the seminar on
Democratisation in Africa, African Studies Centre, Leiden, 24
September, 1993; I am indebted to the organisers, my colleagues
Robert Buijtenhuijs and Elly Rijnierse, for creating a
stimulating environment for the production of this paper, and to
the present journal’s anonymous reader for stimulating
comments.
[2] For an incisive,
up-to-date summary of that discussion, cf. Buijtenhuijs &
Rijnierse 1993.
[3] Cf. Colas 1992;
Hannerz 1987; Featherstone 1990; van Binsbergen 1994; and
references cited there.
[4] In this respect,
adopting a detached, culturally relative view of the North
Atlantic concept of democracy falls under the tantalising
category of tabooed ideas in international social science, to
which my teacher Kobben (1975, 1991) has devoted illuminating
discussions.
[5] Khumiri village
society, highlands of north-western Tunisia, 1968, 1970; Nkoya
rural society, Kaoma district, Zambia, and its urban extensions
along the Zambian line of rail, 1972 to present; Manjak rural
society, north-western Guinea-Bissau, 1983; Francistown urban
society, Botswana, and its urban-rural ties ramifying into
surrounding Kalanga, Tswana and Ndebele villages, 1988 to
present.
[6] Glover 1927;
Forrest 1966; remarkably, Plato and Aristotle (e.g. Bierens de
Haan 1943) criticised the dhmokratia of their time, not
for being insufficiently democratic but for being
over-democratic, for having become ’oclokrateia, or mob rule.
[7] De Tocqueville
1954; Mannheim 1940; Doornbos et al 1984 and references cited
there.
[8] The following
summary of Dutch constitutional history illustrates this point:
‘Before 1848 the franchise in the Netherlands was very limited
indeed. Even after 1848, at first the vast majority of the
population were deprived of the franchise. Until the
Constitutional Reforms of 1887, the right to vote depended on the
size of the amount one had to pay for taxes (the so-called census
franchise). The Constitution of 1887 made provision for the
extension of the franchise to certain, not clearly defined,
categories of persons, by introducing the criterion of
‘attributes of appropriate status and wealth, which attributes
were further elaborated in the Franchise Bill of 1896. At that
stage categories of voters included ‘tax voters’, ‘dwelling
voters’, ‘salary voters’, ‘savings voters’ and
‘examination voters’. Under this system in 1916 only 70% of
the Dutch males had the right to vote. The Constitutional Reforms
of 1917 introduced the general franchise for males, and in
principle made provision for women’s franchise. In 1922
women’s franchise was enacted in the constitution. (...)
Invariably, the passive franchise accrued to all male Dutchmen
who possessed the active franchise. Until 1917 women were
explicitly excluded also from the passive franchise.’ (Winkler
Prins 1974, my translation; cf. Oud 1967; van der Pot &
Donner 1968. )
[9] Anthropological
field-work among the Zambian Nkoya, alternatingly in Kaoma
district and among migrants in the national capital city of
Lusaka, was undertaken in 1972-74, and during shorter visits in
1977, 1978, 1981, 1988, 1989, 1992 (twice) and 1994 (twice).
Anthropological field-work in Francistown and surrounding rural
areas, Botswana was undertaken in 1988-89 and during shorter
visits in 1990, 1991 and 1992 (twice) and 1994. I am indebted to
the African Studies Centre, Leiden, for the most generous
encouragement and financial support since I joined the centre in
1977; and to research participants, to assistants and government
officials in both Zambia and Botswana and to members of my
family, for invaluable contributions to the research.
[10]
A case in point is African Watchtower throughout South Central
Africa from the 1910s; cf. also the Lumpa church of Alice
Lenshina; van Binsbergen 1981 and references cited there. For
Botswana the rise of church independency as a major form of
contestation preceding by several decades the formation of
political parties (Lagerwerf 1982; Grant 1971; Chirenje
1977) is a case in point. For a general perspective on these
points, cf. Gluckman 1971. For a critique claiming that views
such as mine or Gluckman’s amount to underplaying the
contribution of villagers to the Independence struggle, cf. van
Donge 1986.
[11]
A common assumption in the literature on the articulation of
modes of production in Africa is that young men went to work so
that, via a monetarization of bride wealth, elders could continue
to exercise their kinship-based power in new forms; in fact
however, it was often inter-generational conflict at the village
level (where youths have tended to regard all elderly men as
sorcerers, and often wandered from one kin patron to another in a
long chain of disappointment and distress) which propelled youths
into a career as labour migrants. The comforts of the old African
cosmologies ought not to be exaggerated.
[12]
Outside Barotseland, two more Nkoya royal chiefs survived: Mwene
Kabulwebulwe of Central Province and Mwene Moomba of
Southern Province.
[13]
Even after the state’s creation of Local Courts (which were
nominally independent from the Mwene) in 1965.
[14]
The Mwene is thus one of the Tears [ or, less
anthropomorpically, Drops ] of Rain which feature in the
title of my main book on the Nkoya (van Binsbergen 1992).
[15]
Which is largely an exalted version of the enthronement ceremony
of village headmen, and even of the ordinary name inheritance
ceremony by which a surviving junior kinsmen takes a deceased’s
name.
[16]
I cannot go into the peculiar gender dynamics of high political
office among the Nkoya. Clan heads and early kings tended to be
women, but no female Myene have occurred since the middle of the
nineteenth century. Cf. van Binsbergen, 1986, 1992a.
[17]
At the time political parties and the church provided virtually
the only organisational structure for the rapidly growing
squatter areas where Nkoya urban migrants used to live.
[18]
A fifth Nkoya royal chieftainship has now been revived: in
October 1994, Mwene Pumpola of Dongwe/Lukulu will be
ceremonially installed before delegations of all other royals
courts and with a substantial participation of the Kazanga
association executive and its ceremonial dancing troupe.
[19]
Who had meanwhile been restored to government esteem, and was
even made Member of the Central Committee, i.e. UNIP’s highest
representative in the province, and a Member of Parliament. Under
the Chiluba administration, meanwhile, state-Litunga relations
are steadily declining again, while the Lozi aristocracy tends to
retreat in delusions of territorial secession.
[20]
In line with national usage, Batswana is taken here in the sense
of ‘Botswana nationals’, rather than that of ‘people
identifying as members of the Tswana cluster of ethnic groups’.
[21]
Cf. Holm & Molutsi 1989; Picard 1987; Molomio &
Mokopakgosi 1991; Charlton 1993; Bernard 1989; Crowder 1988; Good
1992.
[22]
As happened with the Francistown PWD squatter area situated in
the Government Camp ward no. 58; van Binsbergen & Krijnen
1989; Krijnen 1991.
[23]
P1 _ US$0.45.
[24]
The results are based on a statistically representative sample
survey of 175 adults (18 years of age and older) of both sexes,
resident in Francistown in 1989; of these, 7% were under the
legal voting age of 21 years. Of the 175 respondents, 98% claimed
to be Botswana citizens, and 87% claimed to be in the possession
of a national registration card (‘O Mang’).
[25]
‘Government Notice No. 326 of 1989, L2/7/98 XX’, in: Republic
of Botswana, Government Gazette, 27, no. 59, 27th October,
1989, p. 1398-1402 — the Francistown returns being listed on p.
1399. These data have been corrected in the light of:
‘Government Notice No. 354 of 1989, L2/7/126/II’, in: Republic
of Botswana, Government Gazette, 27, no. 63, 17th November,
1989, p. 1504, according to which ward 67 was carried not by BPP
but by BDP.
[26]
This was more than half a year before Mr Mandela’s release from
prison, when nobody could foresee the imminent dismantling of the
apartheid state. However, the response was more positive to a
related but differently phrased question:
The political system of South Africa is wrong and must be
changed.’ agree (79%) / don’t know (12%) / disagree (9%).
[27]
Cf. Schoffeleers 1991; church leaders and church committees
present a rather more oppositional picture, cf. van Binsbergen
1993b.
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