Donald I. Ray and P. S. Reddy, eds. Grassroots Governance? Chiefs in Africa and the Afro-Caribbean. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2003. ix + 313 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. Price not reported. Cloth.

Abstract

POLITICS Donald I. Ray and P. S. Reddy, eds. Grassroots Governance? Chiefs in Africa and the Afro-Caribbean. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2003. ix + 313 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. Price not reported. Cloth. Governance is a new policy vogue in Africa, driven mostly by aid donors in an effort to push through democratization processes. In the last several years, the policy has usually emphasized governance. This is the level at which the importance of defined in the book as kings, other aristocrats holding offices, heads of extended families, and office holders in other decentralized polities, as long as their offices are rooted in pre-colonial states and other political entities (3), is paramount. Yet these traditional authorities, referred to by the generic name of chiefs, have had a long history of neglect, which in part reflects the central problem of how to integrate them into democratic systems of local government. The institution of chieftaincy has gone through many vicissitudes in both the colonial and the postcolonial state. During the fifties and sixties, the institution was generally under attack from various quarters, including politicians and intellectuals who came to view it as primitive and resistant to change. To the fashionable modernization theorists of the time, the ascriptive nondemocratic and therefore antimodern character of the institution would not guarantee its survival in the face of modernization. To the dependency theorists, the appropriation of chiefs as agents of rule by colonial and postcolonial states undermined their ability to mobilize for sociopolitical change. Yet half a century into the establishing of the post-colonial state, chieftaincy continues to belie the predictions of these theorists. On the contrary, it has demonstrated exceptional resilience, not only because chiefs remain influential with their subjects, but also because modern elites from all walks of life strive to get chiefs to become their active allies in the pursuit of power. It is this evidence of retraditionalization in many parts of Africa that has rekindled interest in the study of chieftaincy. The book under review falls into this category. It is the result of a number of conferences organized to bring the issue of chieftaincy back to center stage in the debates on local government, since rural areas have been badly neglected by postcolonial governments. As an edited volume, it suffers from the usual lack of balance: More than half the book deals with southern Africa, two chapters are concerned with Ghana (the only country represented from West Africa), while a single chapter on Jamaica is all that represents the Afro-Caribbean. …