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INTRODUCTION

It is 18th April 1997 on a sunny afternoon in Cape Town. The stately South African parliament, with its well-kept lawns, white pillars and red carpets, is filled with unfamiliar sights and sounds. The slow pounding of cow-hide drums, the ululating of women and the shrill voices of half-naked praise-singers. Dozens of chiefs in leopard-skins, beads, colourful flowing robes, sporting knobkerries and assegaais. Today the normal parliamentary debates have to give way to the inauguration of a special body: the National Council of Traditional Leaders.

Behind the festivity, tension lurks. As they listen to a speech by Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, who addresses them as 'my leaders', some traditional leaders grumble in the back benches. What does the government have in store for them? Won't the newly elected local government councils take over most of their duties? What about the rumours that the land they command will be 'democratised'? Why are there still such great differences between their salaries? And when will they finally get an answer to all these questions in the promised White Paper that will supposedly set out official government policy on traditional leaders?

This scene tells us a lot about the central theme of this book: traditional authority and democratisation.

Absent is the rural vote

To outsiders, traditional authority might look like an exotic indigenous pendant adorning the uniform necklace of democracy. But further scrutiny reveals all kinds of tensions between the two institutions. Tensions that are very hard to solve. For today, three years later, most of the questions the traditional leaders posed in parliament remain unanswered. Carving out a role for traditional authority within democracy has turned out to be one of the most politically sensitive issues in the new South Africa. One that not even the majority party agrees on, as one ANC-politician illustrated: 'the discussion on the future of traditional leadership tears our party in half.'

The debate is waged in parliament, in conference halls and in the newspapers. Between traditional leaders, local councillors, politicians and non-governmental organisations. What is oddly absent is the 'rural voice': the thoughts and experiences of rural communities on this subject. Every paper in the rapidly-rising pile of policy documents seems to lament that so little is known about what is happening in the countryside, about how life has changed in the villages since the first democratic elections, to what extent traditions are still followed, or have long since been ditched.

This is why this booklet centres on the rural communities themselves. It is about democracy, tradition and change in one small part of the Northern Province: Sekhukhune, and describes how people try to get to grips with the tension between traditional authority and democracy in everyday life, and what solutions they come up with. In doing so, it also offers a local perspective to those questions that keep cropping up at national level. What and where is tradition today? Who is in charge of the communal lands? What is the relationship between traditional authority and local government? How democratic are the traditional authority areas? And what is a traditional community anyway?

But that's for later. First, let us look at politics and policies, and linger a bit longer with the national discussions on democracy, tradition and change - discussions that are rooted in history, and always seem to be about the same topics: land, local government and customary law.

What is traditional authority?

In the hallway of the government department of traditional affairs there hangs a giant map on which the country's 800 traditional authority areas are marked in different colours. While these areas - all in the former 'homelands' - might cover a mere 12% of South Africa's territory, they are home to the majority of South Africans.
The traditional authorities who rule in these areas make up a group that is as colourful and dissimilar as the patches on the map. Most leaders are male, but then there are also the proud female regents of the North, the famous rain queen, and the woman doctor who is a chief in KwaZulu. Most don't have a background in higher education, but many of their representatives are slick lawyers kitted out with cell-phones, Armani suits and stock-options - and who also happen to be chiefs. They might lead half kingdoms, or be landless. There is one similarity: no traditional leader operates alone. All of them are embedded in traditional and neo-traditional structures - royal councils, tribal councils, general advisory groups - together with whom they form the traditional authorities.
Opinions differ on the nature of traditional authority in South Africa today. On the one hand, chiefs represent the remnants of pre-colonial leadership. The African Renaissance proclaimed so enthusiastically by president Thabo Mbeki should, according to many commentators, also be a tribute to this autochtonous form of governance.

But the public image of traditional authority is shaped not only by the pre-colonial past, but also by more recent time. The Apartheid government made culture, and traditional governance with it, into one of the cornerstones of its policy. Black people were - often forcibly - sent to the homelands, where they were supposed to live under traditional rules and customs. Building upon the remnants of old structures, the Apartheid government moulded a different form of traditional authority. It appointed chiefs, even where chiefs had never previously existed, paid them salaries and told them what to do - everything from recruiting labour to eradicating weeds. Those like Mandela's father who did not wish to co-operate lost their positions.

The resulting unpopularity explains why the struggle in the eighties was often also directed against the chiefs, with their positions in the homeland parliaments, their state salaries and their roles as oppressors. Democracy, it was widely held, would bring elected local government to the rural areas. As Thabo's father, the ANC stalwart Govan famously wrote in the fifties: 'If Africans have had Chiefs, it was because all human societies have had them at one stage or another. But when a people has developed to a stage which discards chieftainship, when their social development contradicts the need for such an institution, then to force it on them is not liberation but enslavement.' A South Africa freed from the shackles of Apartheid would, it seemed, also be liberated from chieftainship.

Traditional authority and democracy

But history was to take a different turn. When Mandela walked free from prison and explicitly greeted the traditional leaders, 'many of who continue to walk in the footsteps of great heroes like Hintsa and Sekhukhune', it was clear that they would not simply disappear into the new South Africa. Through intensive lobbying, the traditional leaders managed to have their 'status, role and position' guaranteed in South Africa's brand new constitution. Still, in the years to come it would remain unclear what those guarantees would mean, and what position traditional leaders would occupy in the democratic state.

Land

A central topic in the debate on the position of traditional authorities is land. In the 'traditional authority areas' in the former homelands, land has the title of communal property. It is often held in trust by the government, who gives traditional leaders and their headmen the right to allocate it to their subjects. The government now wants to give this land back, but is confronted with an essential question: to whom? To the individual traditional leaders? To the 'tribes' as communal entities? To individuals? People who plead in favour of this last option are always confronted with the 'Kenyan example'.
In Kenya communal lands were given back to the people under individual deeds of covenant. Many of the rural dwellers then mortgaged these titles in exchange for loans. As a result, many of them saw their lands - and thus frequently their only source of livelihood - confiscated by the large banks a few years later when they could not pay back the money. Little wonder that the equitable character of communal tenure, where land is divided over the whole community, is often cited in favour of such a system of tenure.

Opponents of this tenure system sneer that the power of traditional leaders over the land often leads to discrimination rather than equitable division. Women, youth and people who somehow don't fit are refused access to land. In addition, the communal system leads to insecurity and hampers investment, as banks and other institutions still require individual ownership titles instead of the 'permissions to occupy' issued by the traditional leaders.

Until now, however, every attempt to tamper with the power of traditional authorities over land has met such ferocious opposition from the chiefs that, as yet, nothing has changed.

Local government

Crucially, the insecurity over land ownership also influences the second unresolved issue: the relationship between traditional authorities and local government. Under Apartheid, the traditional leaders constituted local government in the rural areas; they were 'decentralised despots' with all kinds of judicial and administrative functions. Democratisation brought the notion of wall-to-wall elected local government - not only the cities, but also in the traditional authority areas, which would be run by elected municipal councils. These councils, first elected in 1995, were made responsible for development, services and many other tasks formerly carried out by traditional authorities.

'Two bulls in a kraal', is how the resulting situation has often been described. For a number of reasons, the traditional authorities continue to play a role in local government. The first of these reasons is that many of the pre-1994 laws continue to apply, including the dog-eared 1927 Black Administration Act and its counterparts, which allocate to the traditional authorities such duties as public health, the eradication of weeds and the registration of births and deaths.

Two bulls in a kraal

Apart from the laws, there's also the material legacy of fifty years of governance-through-chiefs: large tribal offices, tribal cars, tribal secretaries and (as they are called) tribal cleaners. Yes, there is also broad administrative experience, but there are generous salaries, too. The elected councillors in the rural areas often miss all this: they have tiny offices and a meagre stipend that has to be supplemented by other jobs. And even if they have the capacity to plan development projects, these are often obstructed by the traditional leaders who control access to land.

Yet there is another reason why traditional authorities continue to play an important role in local government, one that is less tangible, but often felt acutely. It concerns tradition, culture, and the many rural people who consider the chief the leader of the community. These people, often the older community members, find it hard to accept that an elected local government, 'all young boys who should still go to school', now runs local affairs.

Again, government has not yet managed to clarify matters. There is a Municipal Structures Act, which states that traditional leaders may participate in the meetings of the municipal councils, but leaves the details for provincial premiers to decide. And, as it so often does, setting boundaries has also proved to be a contentious issue. The traditional authorities have protested vehemently against the process of municipal demarcation that has often split their communities in two, leaving each half to fall under a different elected local government.

The long-awaited White Paper on Traditional Authorities might help resolve this lack of clarity with regard to the role of the chiefs in local government. All the same, while a discussion document came out in March 2000 as a first step towards such a White Paper, it succeeded merely in pointing out the inconsistencies in policy and legislation. It entirely refrained from offering possible solutions.

Customary law

As well as land and local government, there is the law. What should be the role of customary courts and traditional laws? Just as traditional authorities vary in size and content, so, too, do customary courts. A customary court can consist of a small gathering between two families, a group of men discussing cases under the shade of a thorn tree, or a more bureaucratised get-together in a tribal office. The latter - bureaucratisation - was something else that took place under Apartheid; at that time, traditional authorities were allowed to try cases such as petty theft, family disputes and land matters, against which appeal at the magistrate's court was possible.

The South African Law Commission has recommended that this continue to be the case. In the discussion, it has pointed out the advantages of the traditional system of dispute resolution, which is quick, close to the people, and involves much of the community. Neither would the under-resourced magistrate's courts ever be able to deal with all the cases currently resolved in the communities. Nonetheless, customary courts also have disadvantages: their decisions can be haphazard, they often implement a patriarchal normative system, and corporal punishment is by far from unusual.

Another theme to recur not only in the debate on the future of customary courts, but also in the wider discussion of traditional leadership, is the position of women. Traditional authority often seems to stand for a patriarchal culture, and thus to be diametrically opposed to the new constitution, which promotes equality. This is why, back in the early 1990s, the traditional leaders tried to exclude 'culture' from the Bill of Rights: this would allow them to continue discriminatory traditional practices. In this they were unsuccessful, and all areas of the officially-recognised customary law now also have to comply with the Bill of Rights.

Discrminatory traditional practices

In the case of the customary courts, for instance, the law recognising these courts states that the full participation of women should be allowed. A similar provision was made in the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act. This Act, for the first time in South African history, puts customary unions on a par with civil marriages, allowing for polygamy and the payment of a bride-price. But while it recognises these typical features of customary marriages, it also explicitly states that women are, for all intents and purposes, equal to men. 'This is a complete change of our custom, making it into a westernised institution,' as one traditional leader complained.

Even if the government decides to make customary law less discriminatory by adopting new laws, the question is what effect this will have at the local level. Professor Vilakazi, of the Centre for African Thought, is clear about this: 'You can't change tradition from Pretoria, it has to change from the ground.' But what is happening on the ground? In the debate on tradition and democracy, little attention is paid to the changes in rural South Africa. The whole debate seems cast in dichotomies: African and western, rural and urban, modern and traditional. The reason for this lies with the people who are involved in making policies and drafting laws.
'Most of them are city people, who don't have an idea of what's going on in the rural areas,' says Herbert Vilakazi. This leads the importance of traditional authority either to be trivialised or romanticised. The trivialisers see traditional authority areas as little different from the cities, and the traditional leaders as leftovers from a time that is swiftly fading. The romanticisers, on the other hand, nurture parochial images of traditional leaders as shepherds of coherent communities who still live off the land and follow traditional norms and customs. This accords with the African Renaissance, the whole search for an African identity.

The romantic image is fed by the traditional leaders themselves, who are often considered to be the only spokespersons for the rural communities. If information is needed on life in traditional authority areas, policy-makers generally turn to the Houses of Traditional Leaders, or to other organisations that represent them. But these traditional leaders, just like many of the anthropologists consulted by government, have an interest in painting a conservative picture of culture, one in which traditional leadership is immensely important.

If both approaches - the trivialising and the romantic - are not realistic, then what is? To have a glimpse of rural reality, let us now turn to one particular specific area: Sekhukhune.

Sekhukhune: setting the scene

The four-hour drive from Johannesburg north-east to Sekhukhune is like a journey from one world into another - from the world of sky-scrapers and turquoise-roofed mega-malls, through 'white rural South Africa' with its large-scale farms whose robotic sprinklers hover over endless rows of grain or cotton, and finally to the former Lebowa homeland. Officially, the border may have disappeared, but the boundary between affluent rural South Africa and the former homeland is clear.
Suddenly, potholes appear in the road. Barefoot children in never-quite-fitting school uniforms trek long distances to decrepit schools, while goats and donkeys scurry on the side of the road in the futile hope of finding some grass there. At the bottle-stores youngsters hang around, listening to pounding kwaito and lamenting the lack of jobs in the area: even the mines where there fathers work as migrants are firing people. Some hang around the 'chop shops' where cars hijacked in the urban centres undergo a metamorphosis.

Women walk tall, with bundles of branches or water-filled buckets on their heads, and babies strapped to their backs. Often, they are on their way to the fields where they grow maize, sorghum or beans. 'Don't give Aids a chance, use a condom', shouts a huge billboard in Sepedi while another calls 'A better life for all. Vote ANC'. Under it stands a group of women in the characteristic yellow-and-green outfits of the Zionist Christian Church - only one of the churches to which people in this poverty-stricken area turn. Behind them a village spreads out, with clay and corrugated iron houses separated by skinny papaya-trees and large cactuses.

What many an outsider might consider a dusty and ramshackle backdrop is magaê - home - to others. Many Sepedi-speaking people who work in the urban areas consider Sekhukhune home. Home, where the roots are. Home, where traditional values still count and there is still respect for the authorities. Home, a place to return to from makgoweng (the land of the whites); also the place to return to for burial. A place to send your children, so that they can grow up far away from big-city perils.

In this image of Sekhukhune, traditional leaders play an important role. 'Traditional leadership ensures stability in the community. All our customs and traditions are enshrined in it. Where there are traditional leaders you will find respect between people,' in the words of one school principal. Even if many of the 32 chieftaincies in Sekhukhune are creations of the era of Apartheid and of the homelands, and even if the struggle in the eighties also involved a ferocious campaign against the chiefs, 80 % of the people who live there indicate that they still support a traditional leader.

A whole cocktail of factors make Sekhukhune an interesting area for a consideration of democracy, tradition and change in the new South Africa: the recently installed local government, the glorious history of the region, in which old king Sekhukhune resisted the Boers in the nineteenth century; not to mention the dubious role of many chiefs under Apartheid.

Instead of providing abstract surveys, this books describes some scenes collected from everyday life in five Sekhukhune villages in 1998 and 1999. Nearly all the traditional authorities described fall under one elected local government: that of Greater Ngwaritsi Makhudu Thamaga, which has its seat in Jane Furse. Jane Furse is a fast-growing township-like settlement, built around a taxi-rank and an American-style shopping centre. It straddles two of the chieftaincies described here: Mamone (see chapters two and three) and Madibong (see chapter four). Both are large chieftaincies, comprising many villages (such as Eenzaam, which features in chapter three). How different from Hoepakranz (chapter five), a tiny settlement high up in the Leolo mountains, where the traditional leader is not even recognised by the government. Ga-Masha (chapter six) officially falls under another local government, but this has effectively broken down, forcing the Masha people to turn to Jane Furse for assistance.

Set in a different village, each scene shows how people get to grips with the tension between tradition and democracy, and thereby come up with solutions. In doing so, they afford us insight into the many questions that keep cropping up in the debate. What is tradition today? Who is in charge of the communal lands? What is the relationship between traditional authority and local government? How democratic are the traditional authority areas? And: what is a traditional community anyway?

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