Chiefs and the State in Zimbabwe

This thesis explores issues around state legitimacy and stability in Africa. It builds on Englebert’s proposition that the weaknesses of the African state are the result of the incongruence between modern and traditional institutions and challenges Mamdani’s assertion that the bifurcated state led to despotism in the rural areas. Through two separate but related empirical studies, it demonstrates that the relationship between the government and traditional institutions is crucial to the strength of the state. Its original contribution lies in the first empirical chapter situating an analysis of the language in the parliamentary debates over the 1998 Traditional Leaders’ Act within an analysis of ZANU-PF’s nation building discourse from the UDI period onwards. The chapter examines how the ruling party constructed the power balance between the two institutions through strategic use of discourse. It explores how the discourse around the chiefs completely reversed over the first two decades of independence from presenting them as the enemy to depicting them as central to the Zimbabwean nation. What can be seen through an analysis of the debates around the Act is the government’s ambivalent attitude toward the institution. The second empirical chapter further contributes to empirical knowledge by presenting a case study of two individual chiefs and their interactions with the government. It unsettles the common proposition that the institution is monolithically under the control of the government. These studies show the agency and strength of the chiefs and how an antagonistic relationship leads to weak rural governance. The thesis takes a qualitative approach through combining an analysis of Hansard debates, newspaper articles, books and interviews. The empirical chapters discredit the idea that the ‘traditions’ of modern Africa are statically related to those of pre-colonial Africa and assert that the chiefs assert agency and respond to the contemporary state in ways that are decidedly ‘modern’. It shows how, despite the legislative power the government holds, local chiefs have the power to act independently of these legislative limits due to the amount of legitimacy they hold within their communities. This ability to act independently can lead to confusion and disorder in the countryside, showing that traditional authorities hold an important position within state structures. The implication of this research is that they are a crucial factor in state society relations and can hold the key to bridging the gap in that relationship.