This chapter focuses on politics at a scale that has been mostly invisible in political science analyses of Africa: the scale of the “local state” constituted by chieftaincy. Our argument is that redistributive conflicts generated in these arenas are tamped down at this level, and this is a result of state-building strategies chosen to produce this very effect. For national political systems as a whole, the effect is to weaken the possibilities for building larger social coalitions, shorten the reach of national institutions, strengthen and reproduce ethnic identity as a political status that individuals are constrained to assume, and diminish the national public sphere.

The analysis in this chapter focuses on land politics in northern Cameroon and the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Variation across these two settings (and across both space and time within each region) provides considerable leverage on the main hypotheses and creates opportunities to refine some aspects of the argument. Chieftaincies in both regions are strong by African standards, corresponding in part to the extensive land-allocation powers of the so-called customary authorities in the most visible of the lamidats of northern Cameroon and in Ghana's Ashanti Region. They define what Mamdani (1996a) calls “local states,” and constitute local public spheres in which membership in these local polities is performed and reproduced. Within these public spheres, populations subject to the land-allocation authority of the neocustomary elites are audiences for the performance of chiefly power.