<em>Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa</em>, J. Michael Williams

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa Stephen Agyepong Williams, J. Michael. 2010. Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 300 pp. $24.95 (paper). Chieftaincy in South Africa after apartheid has been important but controversial. As J. Michael Williams, an associate professor of political science at the University of San Diego, has delineated in Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy, it has adapted to the prevailing norms of public democracy. This book helps its readers understand many nuances of this adaptation, including the means by which chieftaincy continues to assert its power. The book has eight chapters, an acknowledgment, and a useful section for abbreviations, notes, a bibliography, and an index. The first chapter serves as an introduction, wherein Williams discusses chieftaincy, the state, and the desire for chieftaincy to dominate. In chapter two, “The Binding Together of the People,” he discusses chieftaincy as the balm that unites the populace. In many African countries, chiefs are expected to eschew politics, especially partisan politics; however, Williams places such importance on politics that he examines how carefully chiefs negotiate South Africa’s political landscape. He shows that traditionalists see chieftaincy in democratic terms, while its opponents see it as an anachronistic institution, which lacks legitimacy because chiefs are not elected. Williams goes beyond the call of intellectual or research duty to describe the network of formal-cum-informal accommodations that have gone a long way to ease the interactions of local and state units. He puts a premium on local perceptions of chieftaincy. In doing so, he brings into the open diverse efforts at democratization, at local, national, and other levels. This book should appeal to scholars and researchers from various disciplines. Statistical experts will benefit from its data, which include the fact that not less than 2400 individual royal persons—including chiefs, kings, queens, and headmen—live and operate in seven of the nine provinces of South Africa. They see themselves as traditional rulers, who have jurisdiction or authority over specific territories, of which there are 774 chiefdoms in all. This book has many similarities, in usefulness, to Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s–1990s (University of Rochester Press, 2006), a book by Olufemi O. Vaughan, Geoffrey Canada professor of history at Bowdoin College. Williams’s book complements Vaughan’s, as both books demonstrate the authority that chieftaincy enjoys in both southern and western Africa. There are no clear cut ways in which these traditional institutions take shape, but readers learn that chieftaincies play useful roles, especially in national development and promoting traditional norms. That is why the recommendations provided by Lauren Morris MacLean, a professor of political science at Indiana University, and Clifton Crais, a professor at Emory University, are themselves meaningful and worthy of praise: seeing the complications of chieftaincy, MacLean commends the care by which Williams [End Page 109] has woven a scholarly net around the interactions between the central state chieftaincy and local people; to Crais, Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy makes an important and substantive contribution to our understanding of political change in South Africa. Stephen Agyepong Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana Copyright © 2010 Indiana University Press