Sesay draws from three hinterland protests against multinational corporations in the mining and agricultural sectors to examine how global capital influences central/local politics in postcolonial Sierra Leone. Focusing specifically on the mediating role of traditional rulers—a strong legacy of British colonial indirect rule—Sesay argues that hinterland protests not only enable the relative autonomy of rural citizens to (re)negotiate with the state outside existing political arrangements but also challenge the broker authority of these rulers in center/peripheral relations. While some protests form new alignment of interest with traditional rulers, others allow rural citizens to bypass their chiefs to summon the attention of central authorities. In either of these processes, the local constituents question the position of chiefs in the indirect governance system and shape the governing strategies adopted by the central government to rule over the hinterland.

This article examines the transformation of mineral matter into mineral property from the vantage point of Ga-Mphahlele, a section of northern South Africa's platinum belt in which minerals are particularly complex to access. Building on Thomas Sikor and Christian Lund's work, I show that the demands of mining capital played a key role in facilitating a co-constitutive relationship between political authority and mineral property. Because of the geological difficulties accessing Ga-Mphahlele's platinum, mining companies have only shown an intermittent interest in the area's minerals, resulting in a volatile relationship between mineral property and political authority. In turn, this has meant that minerals have often been a relatively unstable property form. By adding the role of capital to Lund and Sikor's analytic lens for studying property and authority, this article tracks the relationship between chiefly authority, African land purchasing, platinum companies, and the emergence of mineral rights.

The article surveys the views of Pashtun military-administrative elite on governance in the works of Khushḥāl Khān Khaṫak (d. 1689) and Afżal Khān Khaṫak (d. circa 1740). The texts under discussion pertain to the universal literary genre of “Mirrors for Princes” (naṣīḥat al-mulūk) and include the Khaṫak chieftains’ didactical writings in prose and verse, as well as still poorly studied documents on real politics from Afżal Khān's historiographical compilation “The Ornamented History” (Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ). Rooted in the medieval Persian classics, early modern Pashto “mirrors” are distinguished by local ethnocultural peculiarities which manifest in shifting the very subject from statesmanship to chieftaincy and declaring regulations of the Pashtun unwritten Code of Honour. The study proves that the outlook and behavioural patterns of Pashtun tribal rulers stemmed from a combination, partly eclectic and contradictory, of Islamic precepts, feudal ideologies of the Mughal administrative system, and norms of the Pashtun customary law (Pashtunwali).

As colonial and nationalist governments pursued small-scale development in mid-century northern Ghana, so-called ‘voluntary’, ‘communal’, or ‘self-help’ labor became a key determinant of funding. District records and oral histories show how colonial officials, chiefs, and party politicians alternately cast unpaid labor as a way to cut costs, a catalyst for new forms of politics, and an expression of local cohesion. This article extends analysis of ‘self-help’ beyond articulations of and debates about national policy, examining daily negotiations over budgeting and building. It follows two chiefs who used their ability to raise labor to navigate a rapidly changing political landscape. The line between coercion and voluntarism was rarely clear, nor were the meanings of labor fixed for administrators, chiefs, or their constituents. These local actors created the circumstances for successive governments to frame unpaid labor as a legitimate demand on rural citizens.

This article examines how contestation between political parties, politicians, and their supporters shaped Guinea's decolonization from 1945 to 1961. The last region to resist the rise of Sékou Touré's PDG, the Fulbe-dominated Futa Jallon – as both a political space and representation of Fulbe culture – was at the center of strategic and intellectual struggles over the shape of the postcolonial Guinean state and society. What resulted from contestation was the general belief that the Fulbe and the Futa Jallon were divergent from the rest of Guinea, a fragment in the making.

Based on both archival research and oral interviews conducted in northern Namibia, this article traces the history of public flogging in Ovamboland throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to recent scholarship that views corporal punishment in modern Africa mainly through the lens of colonial governance, the article argues that because the South African colonial state never withdrew the power to punish from the region's traditional authorities, these indigenous leaders were able to maintain a degree of legitimacy among their subjects, who looked to the kings and headmen to punish wrongdoers and maintain communal norms. Finally, the article explores why nostalgia for corporal punishment remains a salient feature in Namibian society today, 25 years after the end of colonial rule.

In a historiography that paints relations between chiefs and women as antagonistic, the history of the Nazaretha Church in Mtunzini, South Africa in the early twentieth century sheds light on conditions that allowed chiefs and women to find common ground. During the era of segregation, Mtunzini was, on one hand, subject to relatively less interference from white government officials, but, on the other, ravaged by social and economic change. In this context, the Nazaretha Church flourished thanks to the support of many chiefs and women. The religious community not only proposed new answers to related questions about health, healing, and morality, but it also afforded chiefs and women important social options amid rural decline and challenges to traditional authority.

This article examines the use of tradition by minority groups whose territorial incorporation into British Northern Togoland under UN trusteeship was marked by political exclusion. This contrasts with the more typical pattern of productive and inclusive relations developing between chiefs and the administering authority within the boundaries of what was to become Ghana. In East Gonja, marginalized groups produced their own chiefs while simultaneously appealing to the UN Trusteeship Council to protect their native rights. The article contributes to studies on the limits of the ‘invention of tradition’ by showing the influence of external structures on African agency and organization. As the minority groups sought UN support on the basis of their native status, the colonial power affirmed alternative versions of tradition that were perceived locally as illegitimate and thereby rendered ineffective.

In 1916 a warlord named Oorlog – ‘war’, in Afrikaans – moved into the Kaokoveld in the far north-west of what is now Namibia, and drove off the original inhabitants. Shortly after, Oorlog was formally recognized as a chief by the newly established South African administration and elevated to the highest position of power in the Kaokoveld. This article, through investigating how Oorlog came to be elevated to this position of power, explores issues of colonial governance and personal relationships. By focusing on the micropolitics of the Kaokoveld, it emphasizes how interpersonal relationships – not bureaucratic structures – were of crucial importance in the establishment and maintenance of early colonial rule in Africa.

Twentieth-century Natal and Zululand chiefs' conversions to the Nazaretha Church allowed them to craft new narratives of political legitimacy and perform them to their subjects. The well-established praising tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zulu political culture had been an important narrative practice for legitimating chiefs; throughout the twentieth century, the erosion of chiefly power corresponded with a decline in chiefly praise poems. During this same period, however, new narrative occasions for chiefs seeking to legitimate their power arose in Nazaretha sermon performance. Chiefs used their conversion testimonies to narrate themselves as divinely appointed to their subjects. An alliance between the Nazaretha Church and KwaZulu chiefs of the last hundred years meant that the Church could position itself as an institution of national stature, and chiefs told stories that exhorted unruly subjects to obedience as a spiritual virtue.

The elaborate mortuary rites of the Chitimukulu (the paramount chief of the Bemba people) attracted the attention of both colonial administrators and anthropologists in inter-war Northern Rhodesia. This paper examines the political and symbolic significance of these rites before turning to an analysis of accounts, by the anthropologist Audrey Richards, of the deaths of two ‘commoners’ in the 1930s. The paper argues that chiefly power resided less in the threat of death which was enacted spectacularly in the Chitimukulu's mortuary rituals than in the promise to create and protect life, located in the practices of quotidian life. This promise of the creation and protection of life was being progressively undermined by the conditions of colonial rule.