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Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law: Centre-Periphery Relations in East-Central Botswana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Richard P. Werbner
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Extract

There is a familiar stereotype overrunning much of the anthropological literature on political and economic development in new nations. Brokers and big men have captured the stage, and their chains and alliances, their manipulations and calculations, their political games as men in the middle of centre-periphery relations have loomed larger than life in the literature. Indeed, it has come to be almost a matter of faith in certain studies of new African nations, especially studies influenced by work on India, to regard political questions within the frame of a patronage model, since it has been taken for granted that transactions between patrons and clients or “friends of friends” control the stuff of politics, the decisions about who gets what, when and how. How and why the rule of law is upheld during those periods of major change in government that come immediately before and after Independence remains a largely neglected question. Yet in a new nation citizens may also take political action through appeals to ministers, courts, tribunals, or commissions of enquiry and thus subject decisions by the local government to review and sometimes revision by the central government. The outcome need not be a foregone conclusion, because the hearings may pit the interests of the central and the local government against each other. The central government may then have to defend the aggrieved citizen against the local elected officials or civil servants. The point is not that a citizenship model has to be put in the place of the old patronage model. Rather the power of citizens in a new nation qua citizens has to be taken as problematic, and their powerlessness without middlemen or brokers cannot be assumed, especially in centre-periphery relations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of African Law , Volume 21 , Issue 1: SPECIAL NUMBER IN HONOUR OF ISAAC SCHAPERA , Spring 1977 , pp. 24 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1977

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References

1 I carried out my fieldwork among Tswapong of Botswana in 1972–73 for twelve months, and made my main centre and home in the village of Moremi, or Goo-Moremi as it is now gazetted. I am indebted to the people of Moremi who welcomed me so hospitably, and I am grateful also to the University of Manchester for paid leave and the Social Science Research Council for a grant as part of a five-year project, under my direction, on Rural Competition and Social Change in Botswana. I wish to thank, too, N. J. Mahoney whose research on the village of Bobonong in Botswana, as a part of the S.S.R.C. Project, has challenged me to rethink my views on the politics of big villages. Earlier versions of the paper were presented to seminars at Brandeis University, and the Universities of Manchester, Wales (Swansea), and London (S.O.A.S.). I also benefited from the comments of E. V. Walter, Tim Ingold, David Rheubottom, and Clyde Mitchell, who read the paper and helped me to improve it.

2 A notable exception to this, for the colonial period, is L. A. Fallers, “Administration and the Supremacy of Law in Colonial Busoga” in lan Hamnett (ed.), Social Anthropology and Law, London, 1977; and also, Law without Precedent: Legal Ideas in Action in the Courts of Colonial Busoga, Chicago, 1969.

page 25 note 1 F. G. Bailey, “Parapolitical Systems” in M. J. Swartz (ed.), Local Level Politics, London, 1969 and Stratagems and Spoils, Oxford, 1969. For a useful critique of Bailey's approach see Sydel Silverman, “Bailey's Politics” (1974), 2, Journal Peasant Studies, 111–220. My argument has also been stimulated by Bruce Kapferer, Strategy and Transaction in an African Factory, Manchester, 1972, and (ed.) Transactional Analysis, Philadelphia, 1976.

page 25 note 2 H. U. E. Thoden Van Velzen, “Robinson Crusoe and Friday: Strength and Weakness of the Big Man Paradigm”, (1973) 8 Man 596.

page 26 note 1 The seminal account of tribal political organisation in this district under the Protectorate is I. Schapera, “The Political Organisation of the Ngwato of the Bechuanaland Protectorate”, in Fortes, M. and Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (eds.), African Political Systems, Oxford, 1940.Google Scholar

page 28 note 1 I have kept the village's own name and not used a pseudonym, because it is readily recognisable due to its unique cult of the kotnana. For convenience, however, I refer to the three other nearby villages geographically in relation to the new central village. Moremi is to the west of it.

page 30 note 1 A comparable situation is reported for a small village of Kgalagadi in western Botswana by Kuper, A., Kalahari Village Politics, An African Democracy, Cambridge, 1972Google Scholar, and “Council Structure and Decision Making” in Richards, A. and Kuper, A. (eds.), Councils in Action, Cambridge, 1975.Google Scholar He also describes clear instances of the concentration of power in big villages under strong chiefs in “The Social Structure of the Sotho-Speaking People of Southern Africa (Part II)” (1975), 45, Africa, 139–149. For a more general discussion of the avoidance of the concentration of power see Walter, E. V., Tenor and Resistance, Oxford, 1969, 65.Google Scholar

page 31 note 1 W. Tordoff, “Local Administration in Botswana“, (1974) XII Journal of Local Administration Overseas 303.

page 31 note 1 For a general account of village development committees in Botswana see P. Wass, “The History of Community Development in Botswana in the 1960's” V (1969) 4, Botswana Notes and Records, 81–93, reprinted from International Review of Community Development: see also R. Vengroff, “Popular Participation and the Administration of Rural Development: The Case of Botswana” (1974) 33 Human Organisation 303–309, and Tordoff, 1974: op. cit., 298.

page 32 note 1 The councillor was a close affine of the acting head of East Village, once himself a dissident living away from his village's centre, and the affinal relationship was important not only for their alliance but also for the campaign of the councillor's enemies to discredit his efforts.

page 33 note 1 I develop related points about the politics of history under colonial rule in “Constitutional Ambiguities and the British Administration of Royal Careers among the Bemba of Zambia” in Nader, L., (ed.), Law in Culture and Society, Chicago, 1969. See also Elizabeth Colson, Tradition and Contract, 1974, 80 and John Comaroff, “Rules and Rulers: Political Processes in a Tswana Chiefdom”, (forthcoming, 1977) Man.Google Scholar

page 39 note 1 I. Schapera, Government and Politics in Tribal Societies, London, 1956, 220.Google Scholar