By Nomalanga Mkhize, Custom Contested
In recent weeks, South African news reports have been filled
with leaders announcing claims and counter-claims to land on behalf of their
“people” and royal clans under the newly amended Restitution Act of 1994.
These royal claims are said to be justified by South Africa’s
history of colonial dispossession, which was the most extreme on the African
continent and waged through two centuries of warfare, and 50 years of legislated
discrimination.
Notwithstanding the need for historical re-dress, something
rings false about the political intentions behind these claims. Though small in
number, the kinds of claims being announced by traditional leaders implicate
large portions of our country’s landmass. With very clear explicit backing from
the highest political office, the presidency under President Jacob Zuma, the
impetus for the new process appears to be aimed at boosting the political
status of traditional leaders who have been vociferously lobbying government to
restore excessive powers curtailed by the 1996 Constitution.
While the re-opening land restitution process was supported
by rural associations such as Ntinga Ntaba kaNdoda in the Eastern Cape, the
very same organisation also warned Parliament to ensure that the process did
not favour chiefs or lead to a “re-tribalisation” of rural residents.
Ntinga made these warnings in a context where for the past
decade or so a number of bills and acts emanating from the Traditional Leadership
and Governance Framework Act of 2003 have, in effect, re-inscribed the
political geography of the much hated 1951 Bantu Authorities Act, which
virtually turned rural residents into feudal subjects under the often despotic
rule of unelected rulers.
The reproduction of apartheid “tribal” boundaries in our
democracy was bad enough, but the tabling of legislation that gave chiefs
unconstitutional powers was received as a bitter betrayal by rural citizens as
was evident in the fierce opposition to the Communal Land Rights Act of 2004,
which was defeated in the Constitutional Court, and the Traditional Courts
Bill, which failed to pass in parliament earlier this year.
There is no doubt that the Department of Justice and
Constitutional Development tried its damndest to get the Traditional Courts
Bill passed even though it was patently undemocratic, unconstitutional and was
fiercely opposed by many rural residents.
And the state is doing it again with this new restitution
process that has the potential to stir up ethnically-charged conflicts between
royals, their followers and those perceived as outsiders.
The question is: why is the government pushing ahead with
these potentially explosive scenarios?
My speculation is that there must be some assumption amongst
our elected leaders that siding with unelected traditional leaders will have
some political benefits.
But what sort of benefit might this be? Presumably, the rural
populace already votes the African National Congress without being compelled by
chiefs, and indeed, in many areas, they vote for the ANC against the wishes of
the chiefs.
Then why would the ANC risk the support of rural residents by
courting traditional leaders in unprogressive ways?
One answer is simply that for a cohort of conservative leaders
within the ANC, there are political gains to be made if the rural population
can be made to accept that traditional leaders are their political and
customary proxy.
Custom and tradition are perfect ideologies for curtailing
democratic accountability because they make social hierarchies and male power
appear natural and beyond question.
Conservative elites cleverly exploit custom in a way that
positions them to enjoy the benefits of the modern state while using culture to
silence or discredit citizens attempting to hold them accountable.
Without a doubt, the ANC is evermore succumbing to the
enticements of patriarchal power and the seduction of neo-traditionalist
politics. This cannot be separated from the way in which President Zuma himself
has been protected and continues to evade culpability in key scandals,
including the landing of his friends’ private plane on a national military base
and the clear abuse of the fiscus in the security upgrades of his personal home
in Nkandla.
One could not escape the sense that the President was being
given the “royal” treatment himself, when the blame was placed on civil
servants as though they are irresponsible subjects who have tarnished his
reputation. What is relied upon is the image of the president as being wholly inerrant.
This is a natural extension of the logic of monarchy, not of democracy.
The blurring of the image of the president with a type of
‘kingliness’, combined with the growing politics of entitlement by traditional
leaders, explains why the ANC would find resonance with the culturalist
politics of traditional leaders.
Yet the failure of the Traditional Courts Bill likely caught
its strongest proponents by surprise and should have been a warning to our
elected leaders that in South Africa, rural residents know that participating
in living customs does not necessarily come at the expense of being full
citizens of a democracy. In the long run, the ANC stands to lose more than it
can gain if it keeps pushing the agenda of neo-traditionalists.
