Abstract: In the late 1980s, at a time when the newly independent Zimbabwean state was still struggling fortify local organs of legal and development administration, a group of male collaterals in the northwestern district of Gokwe was inventing a parallel corporate structure for purposes of limited self-governance. This article narrates the dramatic events consequent upon a case of rape and incest, using it as a point of departure explore how spheres of local jurisdiction may be carved out and tested, and the morality of state intervention ultimately contested, by a newly imagined, if deeply patriarchal, form of civil society. A society composed of an infinite number of unorganized individuals, that a hypertrophied State is forced oppress and contain, constitutes a veritable sociological monstrosity. For collective activity is always too complex be able be expressed through the single and unique organ of the State. Moreover, the State is too remote from individuals; its relations them too external and intermittent penetrate deeply into individual consciences and socialize them within. -- Emile Durkheim, 1964 [1902]: 28The state in postcolonial Africa routinely fails provide the kind of moral authority it pretends command, as the lengthening literature on corruption, terror and arbitrary or personal rule well attests (see Davidson, 1992). Still, communities must somehow make their way within the state's shadow, constantly testing or negotiating the limits of autonomy under circumstances that are often as hard fathom as they are predict (Bayart, 1993). Some limits are more easily, or more urgently contested than others, of course, so that asserting the right raise a local militia may be less worthwhile or important than adroitly avoiding the payment of crop levies. In any case, the pathways through and around the web of laws that authorize state power are not easily classified as instances of resistance to or compliance with the state (see Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991; Lazarus-Black and Hirsch, 1994). So much, I hope, will become clear from the story I will shortly present, the story of an effort constitute a limited form of patriarchal self-governance lying parallel the official state.The now-independent nation of Zimbabwe was claimed as a colony for the British by Cecil Rhodes and the Pioneer Column in 1893. The same year, we might note, marked the publication of De la division de travail social, Durkheim's famous essay on the changing relation of moral order social form under conditions of industrial and political modernity. At the time, the problem of state-making in western Europe had, at least for the time being, been effectively resolved. Neither the formal sovereignty of the state, nor its moral hegemony over ordinary citizens were any longer seriously in question (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). It was the excessive, rather than the exiguous, permeation of social life by the state that Durkheim seems have found worrisome. By comparison, the nature, degree and terms of hegemonic domination enjoyed by the postcolonial states of Latin America at the same moment were all at that time still very much being worked out (Joseph and Nugent, 1994; Mallon, 1995).African societies, in contrast, had only just begun find themselves compressed into the straitjacket of colonial boundaries and the regimes of colonial discipline, the results of which are still today openly contested in many African states, three or four decades after achieving independence. At the 19th century's end, the multi-imperial project famously initiated on paper at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 had largely been realized in the form of colonies on African soil, just as the British defeat of Boer independence heralded the unification of the modern South African state. These events have been meticulously documented, of course, but the experiential meaning or moral assessment of the colonial state for Africans newly subjected it is rather less well described (see Mamdani, 1996, Vincent, 1994). …
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Jan 1, 1998
Jocelyn Alexander + 1
