Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- 9 Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
- 10 Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
- 11 Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
- 12 Renaming the state in Africa today
- 13 Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
- 14 The domain of civil society and its politics
- 15 The domain of traditional society and its politics
- 16 Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
15 - The domain of traditional society and its politics
from Part 2 - Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- 9 Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
- 10 Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
- 11 Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
- 12 Renaming the state in Africa today
- 13 Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
- 14 The domain of civil society and its politics
- 15 The domain of traditional society and its politics
- 16 Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The crux of the palaver is at the end, when the ‘guilty party’ is rehabilitated as a member of the community. In fact, there is not one ‘guilty party’, but several. All the members of the community feel guilty for not having succeeded in preventing conflict from taking root in their midst. The palaver rises above the law of retaliation, above justice as such … Naturally the colonizers succeeded in playing down the political role of the palaver. They simply ignored it and, what is worse, concealed it, for they knew how powerful and especially how significant it was.
–K. Diong, ‘The Palaver in Zaire’, 1979 (emphasis added)There is no Hutu, no Tutsi. We are all simply human beings.
–Statement by Muslims against the genocide in Rwanda in 1994TRADITIONAL SOCIETY AS A DOMAIN OF STATE POLITICS
While in civil society state politics are thought around the concepts of citizenship and human rights, in traditional society it is culture and custom that are the operative terms for thinking politics. Both ‘rights’ and ‘culture’ are, of course, objects of struggle and are never simply given. Tradition here will be understood primarily as a produced subjectivity of state-power relations that demarcate a traditional society. Traditional society is predominantly characterised by a mode of rule that revolves principally around the institution of the chieftaincy, which itself embodies (although not necessarily exclusively) the powers of custom and tradition. In this particular domain of politics, the relations between state and people are thus thought differently from the way they are thought in both civil and uncivil societies. Here it is a certain connection with the past that governs such relations and provides the parameters within which political subjectivity is deployed, although it must be plain that these relations are contemporary with modernity, produced and reproduced to suit contemporary conditions. Because they refer to the past, it is a supposedly unchanging inherited culture – ‘the customary’ – that provides the dominant reference for politics in traditional society and not rights as such. Such relations and subjectivities are, of course, always contested and generally ‘invented’ or, perhaps better, ‘remoulded’ to suit the interests of power (Ranger, 1985b, 1993; Vail, 1989).
- Type
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- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 473 - 520Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016