Deliberative democracy and the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa: A case of despotic domination or democratic deliberation?

Abstract

A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of 'deliberative democracy'. This debate is fanned by the claims of 'traditional leaders' that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a superior process for the African continent as it evolves from pre-colonial tradition, but that it represents a form of democracy that is more authentic than the Western version. Proponents suggest that traditional ways of deliberation are making a come-back because imported Western models of democracy that focus on the state and state institutions miss the fact that in African societies state institutions are often seen as illegitimate or simply absent from people's daily lives. In other words, traditional leadership structures are more appropriate to African contexts than their Western rivals. Critics suggest that traditional leaders, far from being authentic democrats, are power-hungry patriarchs and authoritarians attempting to both re-invent their political, social and economic power (frequently acquired under colonial and apartheid rule) and re-assert their control over locallevel resources at the expense of the larger community. In this view, the concept of deliberative democracy is being misused as a legitimating device for a politics of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is the opposite of the meaning of the term in the European and US sense. This article attempts to contextualise this debate and show how the efforts by traditional leaders to capture an intermediary position between rural populations and the state is fraught with conflicts and contradictions when it comes to forming a democratic state and society in post-apartheid South Africa.

The roots of resilience: Exploring popular support for African traditional authorities

“…This issue of performance is in fact an increasingly prevalent, perhaps dominant, thread in the most recent literature on the role and resilience of traditional authorities. The crux of the performance argument is that the main reason traditional leaders continue to be important to rural communities is because of the failure of the state, at both central and especially local levels, to perform or provide an effective alternative (Dionne 2010, LiPuma andKoelble 2009;Bratton et al 2005; see also Williams 2010: 14-16). Local governments, on average, receive very poor performance ratings in most of Africa .…”

Neotraditional authority contested: the corporatization of tradition and the quest for democracy in the Topnaar Traditional Authority, Namibia

“…Resistance to neotraditional leadership arises from various sources (see Claassens 2014; LiPuma and Koelble 2009; Ntsebeza 2005; Turner 2014), but discontent with the looting of collective resources is widely reported at present 5 . Coyle (2018) shows that, in contemporary Ghana, it results in local uprisings and some ‘fallen chiefs’ have had to flee their chiefdoms.…”

Rituals of Solidarity in the New South Africa

“…According to this position, thick identities are always bound up with exclusionary projects, such as the production of socioracial nationalisms and indigenous homelands. As we have shown elsewhere (Koelble and LiPuma 2011; LiPuma and Koelble 2009), the argument made for the inclusion of hereditary leaders within the new democracy is that they represent and embody quintessentially African sources of people's identity and solidarity (Williams 2010). This position not only assumes that there is a distinction between the primordial and hence non‐rational sources of national integration and solidarity, on the one hand, and the intellectually produced and therefore rational sources of political legitimacy on the other, it assumes that the former constitutes the precondition of the latter 5 .…”

“…To give one key example: the public conversation on the meanings of ‘tradition’ (Koelble and LiPuma 2011; LiPuma and Koelble 2009), which can itself be instrumental in creating solidarity through the idea of our national conversation, is only available to those who have the economic resources to own communication technologies (e.g., a television, computer, etc.) and the linguistic and educational capital that allows them to converse on the national stage, in English and in a discursive style appropriate to civil society discussions.…”