Armando marques guedes, the state and traditional authorities in angola mapping issues, article in (eds ) a marques guedes and maria josé lopes, the state and traditional authorities in angola and mozambique, p

However, this seems fairly improbable, if only by mere induction: quite a few of the studies carried out inthe last two decades – if not, indeed, most them – alert us to thepresence of a

THE STATE AND ‘TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES’ INANGOLA: MAPPING ISSUES

Armando Marques Guedes

Many contemporary African States have been diagnosed assuffering a crisis of legitimacy1 Such understanding is notunconnected to the often turbulent processes of State-building inwhich they are engaged Much about the contemporary crises isrooted in the notorious uneasiness which these only recentlyreconfigured and often fragile States commonly show when theytry to yet again adapt – and to do so once more at an unhealthilyhigh speed – now to a world rapidly engaged in the changesaccompanying the processes of transformation we callglobalization But there are other, more historical, reasons, for adebit in legitimacy which we can easily detect: some of it is alsoundoubtedly anchored to normal growing pains, a banal, iftransient, state of affairs aggravated by a vulnerability to the

veritable economic tours de force of the generation of African

leaders who succeeded the charismatic Founding Founders of theimmediate post-colonial period

Further reasons are also well worth underlining Many ofthem are decipherable on a purely synchronic plane It seemsclear that many of the current African legitimacy crises that wecan easily detect should also be linked to the presence of “hard”juridical and jurisdictional pluralisms, thick multiplicities whichtend to overlap with sociological, or institutional, ones, andwhich make governance a hazardous business indeed,particularly when the State entities are rendered weak by thedense interactions of changing external and internal conjunctures

1 I am grateful for the comments formulated during both my presentation of the ideas here put forward by scores of those who attended our seminar co-organized with the van Vollenhoven Institute (a prestigious section of the Leiden Law School) at the notable African Studies Centre, and the various readings my text (which I circulated) later received Apart from the rich discussion I held with the other five participants in the Leiden meeting,

I want to thank, in particular, Stephen Ellis, Jan Michiel Otto and Albert Farre for their wonderful inputs, Outside the context of the seminar, this paper was carefully read by Rui Pinto Duarte, David Henley and Maria Johanna Schouten; I want to thank them also for their often detailed and always perceptive commentaries on a piece of work the responsibility for which remains, of course, entirely my own.

True, intermingled manifold pluralisms can be found elsewhere,and it therefore would be unwarranted to see this as a specificallyAfrican issue But in Africa they quite definitely find expression

in multiple domains, they do have an institutional dimension, andrather often any formats of normative harmonization appear to beall but impossible In a wide-lens comparative birds’ eye view,pluralism, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa, is not onlyquantitatively, but in a sense also qualitatively, more intense thanalmost anywhere else2

Now, it may well be that matters of apparent incongruenceare just that, simple questions of appearance and thus perhapseasy to somehow solve However, this seems fairly improbable,

if only by mere induction: quite a few of the studies carried out inthe last two decades – if not, indeed, most them – alert us to thepresence of an endless number of obstacles which hinderattempts to achieve any kind of compatibility (and thus much lessany level of effective integration) between State and customarylaw in contemporary African political communities The lightest

of glances at a century of different modalities of colonialexperiments and practices tends to confirm the impression that ifthere is a solution somewhere, it actually has never been found

So, indeed, there does seem to be a problem here In whatfollows I shall argue that there are indeed good and rather solidreasons for more robust doubts based on matters of simplecongruence

Angola is the example that I will touch upon in the presentpaper, but many others could be found in which I believe this to

be the case A higher level of image-resolution, to spin ametaphor, brings out clearly core reasons for such a conviction: it

is certainly by no means difficult to glimpse the many advancesand retreats on the operation of the systemic grids which over theyears have exerted strong pressures on the arduous and not verysuccessful processes of recognition of local sources of law inAfrica One of the most iconic of these fluxes and refluxes hassurely been that embodied in the to-ing and fro-ing of thedomains of subsidiary jurisdiction connecting budding AfricanStates with the so-called “traditional authorities” As a matter of

2 For a much more developed discussion of these points and associated doubts about the very possibility of formulating generalizations about “Africa”, see my Armando Marques Guedes (2004) monograph, particularly its first section.

fact, the scope formally given to “traditional authorities” seems

to me to be one of the most significant and interestingfluctuations of all those we can analyse And this not onlybecause of the plethora of juridical and political implicationssuch movements generate, but also since such forms ofemblematic “devolution” constitute one of the foremostingredients at the level of the effective spread of a politicalconstructive awareness of the intricacies of legal and institutionalpluralism in Africa They also delineate one of the arenas inwhich formal and informal external pressures (both from theinternational State system and form the donor and NGOcommunities) make themselves more directly felt

More than most, if not all, African countries, Angola wasdeeply scarred by the Cold War and the associated civil throes itengendered It is also thickly plural, in all senses of the term, andthis pluralism has been very affected by its trajectory in the lasthundred and fifty years or so As we shall see, in cases like theones at hand the two trends often converge and strongly reinforceone another

I shall dwell in a few recent Angolan case-stories which Ichose for their relevance when trying to lay out some of the mainissues which relate to what Jeffrey Herbst famously characterised

as “the complicated dance between States and chiefs”3 Myintention is by no means to exhaust the matter; I want merely tothrow some light into what I consider to be insufficiently litcorners Doing so will then allow me – or so I hope – to recastissues in a wider framework and to equate eventual solutions.Even if normative finalities are dropped, such a strategy allowsfor obvious gain At the very least, the cartographic effort willmake it possible for us to draw limits to the possible forms ofcongruity and harmonization between State and “traditional”legal and political normative systems in Angola Throughout, Itry to retain a posture of what I consider to be a healthyequidistance in relation to the various choices faced by Angolan

3 Jeffrey Herbst (2000: 174) A choreography well worth looking into As Herbst himself wrote one page before coming up with that wonderful image, “one of the most contentious issues in the politics of the continent has been the relationship between central authorities and local leaders” The bibliography on these matters is immense.

leaders, by never really going much beyond a delineation of what

we may call the general topography of issues4

A rapid draft In political and juridical terms Angola iscomplex indeed It is not excessive to assert that its three guidingcatch words are plurality, dissemination, and volatility5

“Autochthonous” groups exhibit, not only marked linguistic differences, but also very diverse levels of politicalintegration In the Northern enclave of Cabinda there arenumerous matrilineal “Kingdoms” with rather steep socialhierarchies This, in any case, tends to be the pattern of mostNorthern Angola, even as, in its North-Eastern Provinces, mixed

ethno-“native” Lunda and Tschokwe who came in from the East patentquite different socio-political patterns In the North-West liveBakongo groups who were for many centuries associated withinthe “Kongo Kingdom” All these groups traditionally live byfarming In a line running East from the capital, Luanda, anddown to the coastal city of Benguela, live the Kimbundu, farmers

cum traders, with some subgroups devoted to a mixed fishing

economy

The Central band of the huge Angolan territory, mostly

highlands called the Planalto Central, is inhabited by the

Mbundu farmers, who locally tend to be organized into clans andlineages in a “classical” central African mode Their Southernfringes overlap with mainly pastoral semi-nomadic Ovimbunduspeakers, divided into numerous entities with very fluidboundaries or limits, both socially and territorially SouthernmostAngola has been traditionally inhabited by non-Bantu Hottentots,some of them pastoralists and a few Bushmen subsisting byhunting and gathering and trade with little political integration

4 The opposite track, in fact, of that taken by Ineke van Kessel and Barbara Ooman (1999),

in a wonderful paper about the structure and evolution of traditional chieftainship in modern South Africa, far more preoccupied with the trees than with the forest, with all the advantages and disadvantages which that analytical strategy actually implies I do not believe further about the facts would change the gist of this analysis, although it would definitely give it more intricacy and a wider empirical base and thus a better resolution Kssel and Ooman are concerned with establishing history and genealogy; I am worried about eventual incompatibilities.

5 For a more detailed discussion of the applicability of these guiding ideas to contemporary Angolan realities, see my Armando Marques Guedes (2005), mainly its part 3.

beyond that of local camps Urbanization is rampant in Angola,and the war led to massive and rapid waves of rural exodus.

A sizeable population of mestiços live in the main cities

and in a few of the rural areas too Some hundred thousandPortuguese (some of them farmers, many business men, and alarge number technical support staff) still live in Angola Cubansand Soviets have largely left, but now numerous Chinese havebegun moving in from mainland China, and many are apparently

settling in the Planalto Central, the historical insurgent UNITA

Mbundu haven, although, for most of the 70s and 80s, the far end

of the South-Eastern province of Cuando-Cubango, where themythical Jamba was located, served as its central headquarters.With the unspeakably brutal war and the very profound changes

it induced, fast processes of social and cultural hybridism haveshuffled boundaries which were, anyway, never that clear

My point – the narrative arch of this communication, ifyou will – is simple and straightforward I shall try to argue thatState and “traditional laws” are much more easily rendered

congruent in the long-term than in the short term, particularly in

cases like that of Angola, in which to legal pluralism is added alayer of a thick institutional, or dense sociological, pluralism,generating a sort of high-intensity version of pluralism, whichmust be carefully cartographed if it is to be politicallymanageable What I mainly want to stress is that, in the lastinstance, it seems unavoidable the general arrangement must

ultimately be one of a diachronic subalternity bestowed on

“traditions”, very much along the lines which jurists and politicaland administrative officials have argued for a very long time,although they did so for State-centric and not implicit logical-formal reasons; by this I mean that the hierarchical ascendant ofState law must be clearly asserted and lines must be drawn fromthe outset Other, very different, models are notionally possible,which for instance involve non-hierarchical multilayerednormative accommodations, and arguably we can actually seemany of them in action, for instance in Europe and Canada Butthey will not really work in Angola, given the radicalincompatibilities faced Using case-stories as examples, I will try

to show why I believe this is so

In other words – and, as we shall see, although I do not byany means discount the possibility that laborious processes of

“political accommodation”, as N’Gunu Tiny qualifies them, maypartially and temporarily mitigate tensions – I am convinced that

an effective and stable harmonization can only flow from a lucidawareness of what is at stake, a well pondered management ofpolitical and juridical implications as to the mechanisms ofpractical articulation concerned, and then (and only then) fromthe cautious engineering of a progressive convergence ofcustomary practices with State ones Good or bad, this generaldirection seems to me unavoidable and this if only from “classicdemocratic” considerations In pure formal terms, a convergence

in the opposite direction – that is, having the Angolan State “gonative” –, would achieve the same compatibility; but the result

would not be a modern State, and most probably not even

something in any actual sense recognizable as a State So it isessential for what we call – with some lack of clarity about what

we precisely mean – State-building, an often loosely used term I

will of course dwell further into this point6

My communication is divided into three main sections.First, I shall try to lay out some information I believe essential asbackground data This will amount to no more than a very quickand light sketch of the joint progression of, on the one hand, thearticulation between central and local political-administrativestructures in Angola and, on the other, the changing role thereattributed to local political communities and their leaderships.Alliterating Herbst, I call this joint progression a form of

“synchronized dancing” The point I want to make and convey isthat each of these two series is only fully understandable if andwhen it is placed in the context of the other; I want to show how

6 Although I shall not here try to define “State-building”, as this would obviously exceed the limited scope of this paper So as to be sure that I am not misunderstood here, let me reformulate the point I made in the above paragraph from a slightly different angle: what I

am in fact suggesting is that it is indeed possible to construe accommodation as both a constructivist and a constitutive mechanism, or process For this, it is ultimately enough to assume a less “classic” and perhaps a more “communitarian” view of things social, in the trail of Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, Jeffrey Alexander, or Will Kymlicka, to drop but a few names I would definitely not be surprised if this is what, in the end, will actually take place on the ground, given that, at any rate, a communitarian perspective is held by most Angolan social actors Nevertheless, I will argue, these communitarian solutions shall really only work if State supremacy is guaranteed throughout And the results, even then, may be less than what we normally understand as being a State, and its workings certainly less than democratic.

the current practice of accommodation of “traditional authorities”

is best deciphered as a convenient form of political gesturing, arisky populist one at that, and I add that it involves very realdangers which, unfortunately, are in Angola not alwaysacknowledged

In a second section, I then turn to four case-stories whichgive substance to my earlier point In particular, my interest herewill rest on the drawing of limits Three of my examples are from

the Planalto Central, the most densely populated area of the

country, where Angola´s second city, Huambo, is located, andwhere most locals are Mbundu-speakers, the classical recruitinggrounds for UNITA; not surprisingly, this is in many senses aproblematic area as far as such matters are concerned My otherexample, the fourth and last, is taken from Cuando-Cubango, thebiggest of the Angolan provinces, which occupies the entireSouth-Eastern slice of the country

My third and final section is more interpretative As aresult it is less verifiable, and therefore looser In that last section

I indulge in what ultimately is nothing more than a bundle ofspeculative projections, even though they are (or so I like tobelieve) an exercise in educated guesswork

1

Allow me to start with a few generalities and thenprogressively move down from those Some background, first.Following two or three centuries during which Europeaninfluences were thin on the ground, often harsh, fairly localized,surgical and variable, from 1884-1885 onwards (that is, after theBerlin Conference) all of Africa came under European colonialrule; the sole exception, of course was Liberia, which JamesMonroe had created in 1822 It is interesting to note that already

at the time several legal systems operated simultaneously at thelevel of virtually all territorial and population units distributed inthe Continent On the Magreb as in sub-Saharian Africa, legalpluralism, as we now call it, was the rule

The formal attitude of the newcomer colonialadministrations, which, like it or not, had to face this fact, was by

no means unitary, or in any meaningful sense uniform It is quitetrue, as Edward Keene wrote some four years ago7, that theoverall legal posture assumed by European States was somewhatuniform and it unfolded in contrast to the one that they held intheir relations with one another: while in the latter case

“tolerance” ruled, when interacting with Africa the rule was topush, and often to push hard, for “civilization” But the meanders

of this European colonial propensity (and the lines along whichthey are usually interpreted) were varied and very sinuousindeed

There is not much point in going into great detail hereabout such sinuosity and variety Suffice it to say that RenéDavid, the noted French legal comparatist, was probably right

when he contrasted “l’attitude juridico-coloniale” of the British

with that of the “Latins”, by which he meant the French, thePortuguese, the Spanish and the Belgians8 Although far toogeneral, the contrast drawn out does hold some water According

to R David, the latter “group” [and it is needless to assert quite afew distinctions should be operated here] tended to prefer tocarry out their public administration under the aegis of the figure

of “colonies” and, even when they defended Liberal ideals (asthey often did), they usually adopted policies of assimilation,based on the double implicit that men were of equal value while,somewhat seamlessly, “European civilization” was deemed to beclearly superior to “African customs”

The British, on the contrary, by norm favoured figuressuch as that of “protectorates”, and thus tended to prefer policies

of “indirect rule” As is well known, this was fairly robustlytheorised early in the early nineteenth century (in mainly realistpolitical terms) by Edmund Burke, in relation to India, and itaccepted the notion, at least as a general principle, that “nativeAfricans” could, and indeed should, remain largely self-governedand should administer themselves in accordance with their own

“customs” and following whatever “traditional forms” theydecided to choose; albeit, of course, they were to do so underBritish ultimate supervision and control

7 Edward Keene (2002), mostly pp 60-120.

8 René David (1984): 570-571.

Whatever the merits of R David’s dichotomy, let me stressthe obvious point – obvious, in any case, once one thinks of it for

a second – that British and “Latins” quite naturally and verydirectly appear to have transposed to the colonial relationshipsthey engaged in what amounted to simple variants of thedecentralist and centralist conceptions and models they applied totheir own local communities But this was, in practice, little morethan a declaration of intentions It is fascinating to note that theFrench comparatist’s distinction – insofar, at any rate, as itreferred to the real empirical relationships entertained betweenEuropeans and Africans, or governors and governed if you will –,was little more than a formula9

In practice, the effective similarities, which were blatant inthe concrete “administration” actually carried out by “Latins” and

“British”, far outweighed differences Distinctions betweenpublicist “Common Law” conceptualizations and the “Romano-Germanic” ones, in these as in so many other domains, showedthemselves to amount to little more than mere differences in

style The simplest of thought experiments renders this clear ad absurdum: it would be as unthinkable to imagine that the subjects

of British colonial rule could hold their customs against Imperiallaws in any really significant way, as it would be nạve to believe

in a total and unquestioned hegemony of “Roman” Colonial Law

vis-à-vis populations which were almost entirely alien to them.

In order to bring this contrast into a sharper focus, it isuseful to view things in a more legal-historical fashion Indirectrule was, of course, a policy strategy mainly based on unrealizedtheorizations of Henry Sumner Maine and, insofar as the actualexercise of colonial governance was concerned, it was formatted

by Lord Lugard10 It started in India and by the end of the 19th

9 This, of course, had inevitable consequences in the mechanisms and strategies for consolidation of the political and even cosmological status of those people who later were

to be called, as we shall see, “local chiefs” For a rather detailed and somewhat contrastive cartography of the resultant differences in the modalities of constituting the “offices” of

“chiefs”, see the paper on the Cameroon by Peter Geschiere (1993) P Geschiere compares the British and French examples It would be a fascinating exercise to carry out a similar study on the Portuguese colonial cases (Angola and Mozambique provide certainly quite different examples), which could then be compared to the post-colonial lateral equivalents.

10 For a discussion of the above and other related points, it is useful to look at the classical study of T W Bennett (1981) on Zimbabwe, Martin Chanock (1985) and his timeless work

on Malawi and Zambia, L Benton (2002), and the small but exquisite study written by Cristina Nogueira da Silva (2005) on the distinctiveness of Portuguese colonial doctrine.

Century it was transferred to Africa Independently of pragmaticpolitical considerations, it rested largely on H S Maine’s liberaland very romanticised conviction that legal pluralism was to becarefully respected, since traditional native societies were stable,internally coherent, and fragile, and thus highly susceptible toirreversible destruction if the British colonial State interfereddirectly.

Portuguese colonial doctrines (I use the expression forcommodity, since evidently they varied quite a lot, or perhapsrather, oscillated, throughout both the 19th and 20th Centuries)rested on quite different assumptions and dissimilar ideas InPortuguese colonies – namely, in Angola – Africans could, if they

so wished, give up their normative universes and affiliations, aslong as they did it for good and went for the legal and politicalsystem of the colonial government11 This was seen as the

fulfilment of the Portuguese missão civilizadora It was believed

(and the colonial Codes reflected that explicitly) that, slowly butsurely, Africans would choose themselves to cross the

civilizational divide that separated them from the native Portuguese – the progressive elimination of traditional usos e costumes was indeed deemed to be a natural, and somehow

mechanical, consequence of European colonial efforts

From an empirical point of view, the problematic politicaland administrative issues which led to such objectiveconvergence only really started being raised after the BerlinConference of 1884-1885 The international conditioning – forthe purposes of recognition of colonization rights – of aneffective territorial occupation and control by the would-becolonizer was decisive In Africa (and Africa was indeed themain focus of the Conference), this meant that it became usefuland interesting12 to equate with one another matters which

11 Cristina Nogueira da Silva (2005) op cit.: 918-919.

12 This “first wave” of studies was mainly carried out, in Africa, by British and French scholars Researchers like Isaac Shapiro and E E Evans-Pritchard were paramount We can probably see in Meyer Fortes and E E Evans-Pritchard collection of articles on “African Political Systems”, published in 1940, but naturally based on research work carried out by various workers in the 30s, the peak of this initial period In a perhaps partly Davidian pattern, Latin French and Portuguese researchers tended in this period to concern themselves mainly with the production of legal Manuals on Colonial Administration, rather than focus on local organization The first big Manuals, highly influential as far as colonial

concerned the creation and maintenance of binding ties ofinterdependence between budding colonial States and localchieftainships, be they “kingdoms” or “tribal” units.

What was needed and actively sought was how to makethem viable And in true modernist style, this meant engaging inpreparatory research work Largely as a result starting at the end

of the 19th Century and, mostly, from the beginning of the 20th

onwards, studies on local juridical and political systems andmonographs on African forms of leadership, often carried out by

a relatively new breed of social scientists, anthropologists, begantaking shape These first steps continued well into last century.Their progression, though sustained, was by no means uniform:

as we shall see, changes in the very board in which they tookplace inevitably spelled quite a few radical alterations in theirnature, scope and themes Nevertheless a sort of an analyticalsynchronized dance had begun; its “first generation” took place

in two steps, phases of sorts that I like to refer to as “waves”

If the Great War of 1914-1918 reached Africa, and it quiteobviously did, the Second World War had a profound impact inthe Continent Colonial States were shaken Native Africansstarted coming to Europe in order to get an education And thenew international order drawn by the victors was openlyfavourable to the new winds of self-determination that weremaking themselves felt as a result Perhaps not surprisingly inconjunctures marked by attempts at a reassertion of a “normal”exercise of power, in the period immediately after 1945 a firstpeak was reached in what concerns legal and political studiesabout African chieftainships and the associated politicalcommunities13 For Angola, this was the seminal period in whichadministration was concerned, were produced in this interval.

13 Detailed studies of this “second wave” of research works (but still “first generation” ones,

in my taxonomy) are unfortunately sparse and would be very welcome This was indeed a fascinating period, as research carried out in the laterally equivalent South-East Asian colonies (in particular those occupied by the Japanese, who openly fomented the rise if nationalist movements there) clearly shows Max Gluckman (1955), the classic work on the legal system on the Barotse (Lozi) of Northern Rhodesia, Paul Bohannan (1957) on the dual court system of the Nigerian Tiv, and A.R Radcliffe-Brown and Darryl Forde collection (1950) on “African Systems of Kinship an Marriage” a sort of companion volume to Meyer Fortes and E E Evans-Pritchard (1940) set, were highlights It was possibly the political and often pragmatic tone of works published in this “second wave” that gave rise to Talal Asad’s (1975) and George Stocking Jr.’s (1991) radical imputations of

a complicity between anthropological “knowledge” and colonial “power” An obvious

(with a comparative delay of at least one generation) the first

“ethnographic” studies of groups, written by academics andmissionaries, really took off: names that spring to mind are those

of Cordeiro da Matta and Héli Chatelain, followed by ÓscarRibas, Carlos Estermann, José Martins Vaz and José Redinha

While this “second wave” of analyses lasted, the actualformatting of the studies produced did not vary very much Theirunderlying model is, therefore, quite easy to draft In some cases,local leaders, as well as the type of leadership they engaged in,tended to be looked at as embodying what were deemed to be

rather sui generis “African customary” political and jural forms.

The monographs produced tended to limit themselves to African

“groups” which, for the purpose, were cast as virtuallyautonomous “tribal”, or “cultural”, entities14 A few of theseworks quite explicitly aimed at a political and administrativedelineation which could be of use for colonial administrations.But the majority did not, and they were carried out as basicresearch, as we would now call it

However, this initial phase of research work did to lastlong, as the African scenarios themselves changed Insynchronization with the generalised stampede of independencesthat came about in the 60s and (in the Portuguese case) 70s,amounting to a liberation of Africa and the rise of an Africanparcel of the international State system, this first major

“generation” of research works had an abrupt end The number ofresearch projects devoted to “traditional” legal objects of studydropped very fast, and in quick strides “the State became thecentre of all analytical attentions”15

overstatement For a critical discussion of these views, see Armando Marques Guedes (2003), mostly in the long note 15.

14 Interestingly, and significantly so, these were envisaged as types of organization which were either thought of, in a Durkheimian mode, as reflections of kinship local structures and arrangements in “societies” the “solidarities” and cohesiveness of which were deemed inseparable from consanguineal and affinal ties, or else, in a more Weberian vein, as manifestations of “ideal types” of “power” and expressions of what were ultimately

“charismatic leadership” stages The Weberian model, as we shall see, was to prevail in later times, as scores of what I call “neo-Chiefs” (with little “consanguineal legitimacy”) started emerging in earnest in Africa.

15 Eduardo Costa Dias (2001): 29 [my translation], in a fascinating text alluding to Bissau “notables” and “chiefs”, in the context of that region of Africa.

Guiné-Enthusiastic efforts (and often a strong political andprogrammatic commitment) of researchers engaged in helpingout in the twin processes of State and nation-building – twoexpressions then not really yet in use – demanded it Ananalytical “second generation” of studies emerged as a result Itfollowed the then strongly held conviction that the newlyindependent African States were the real agents of disparatethings such as “development”, “tradition”, and “modernization”.

With hindsight, it seems clear that a sort of convergence ofagendas had occurred Local political forms lost their earlierappeal Ethnographic studies carried out in the “classical” moulddid not disappear, but they definitely saw themselves pushed intothe backseat New types of power were installed Perhaps ofparamount importance, the dissolution of colonial Empiresseemed to spell an end to the disjunction between “indigenouspolitical forms” and the State power that acted upon them Theoften vehement modernizing rhetoric of African nationalistleaders militated to help reify as political correct the putativeconvergence in political agendas of States and chiefs

Or so it seemed The nitty-gritty truth was, for moreattentive observers, that the relationship between States and

“chiefs” was becoming more and more problematic Not muchhistorical and sociological contextualization is needed to render

apparent the ultimate raison d’être for this Throughout Africa,

for the majority of young illustrated (and often Western-trained)nationalists looked for emancipation, as a rule people linked togroups in social ascension in the old colonies and connectedeither to religious missions or to the urban elites of old, theattitudes and aspirations of “local authorities” were deemed to beentirely incompatible with the often revolutionary innovationsdreamed of, often with idealism16 As a result, a strong distrustarose, and it was quite immune to State political-ideologicaloptions: as E A van Nieuwaal wrote, “most heads of state,revolutionary or reactionary, were suspicious of the chief”17

16 Two books are essential for an understanding of this period in Africa That of Jeffrey

Herbst (op cit.), and also that Christopher Clapham (1996), this last one mostly between

pp 31 and 40.

17 E A van Nieuwaal (1987): 20-21.

In many cases, the incongruence at the level of principles

of ordering for a political community was amplified by theambivalent posture that many “local authorities” made their ownduring colonial times and, in particular, by the ambiguity of theirloyalties, pose, and actual allegiances during the often turbulentprocesses that led to independence Seen from the point of view

of “traditional chiefs”, the picture was not more palatable Inmany cases not really understanding neither the methods nor themotives and drive of the young afro-nationalist generations, localchiefs very often hesitated and consequently dragged their feet,when they did not openly oppose the revolutionary agendas ofthe urban educated elites bend on a quick and decisive control ofState power In many cases, as a result of all this, a situation ofmutual distrust prevailed

Mostly, however, in actual fact the situation was muchmore “schizophrenic” than that, to use Jeffrey Herbst’s18 graphiccharacterization of it While young nationalist leaders tended tosee in local chiefs and their “spontaneous” political structures asdangerous competitors for their social engineering agendas, thetruth was they needed them: while, on the one hand, they aspired

to substitute them in the rural hinterlands, on the other it wasprecisely the extension of power to those remote non-urban areasthat which they were looking for, and for that they needed thechiefs, not only as conduits for power, but also for reasonsattached to local legitimacy

Angola, once more, is a good case in point here As wasthe case a bit all over sub-Saharan Africa, the young Angolansovereign State accepted early on to recognize the efficacy of

“traditional authorities” in their role as intermediaries vis à vis

the many local and regional groups distributed throughout theextensive national territory But the acceptance was, at first,hesitant and somewhat renitent It is quite easy, really, tounderstand why: from both an ideological and a nationalistperspective (and the two were absolutely essential ingredients ofthe makeup of the elites controlling the State during the 1st

Republic) the mere fact that their own assumption of power, as

“representatives” of the “people” and of the “Angolans” at large,

18 Jeffrey Herbst, op cit.: 176.

did not automatically condemn “traditional authorities” tooutright irrelevance was a clear factor of discomfort.

On the other hand – and this was effectively a corollary ofthe prior more gut-level reaction – to accept the evidence thatthose “authorities” continued to fulfil important roles and fedfrom local legitimacy, was tantamount to acknowledging thatautonomous political spaces were maintained (as they indeedwere) in what was vehemently desired as a meticulous anduniform political and administrative control over the entirenational population and territory This reflected more than merenational ideological thought: it expressed a very real fear of suchvacuums in the context of a growing and very harsh civil war inmany fronts, in which UNITA, the insurgent group, competedwith the government for precisely that, territorial and populationcontrol Many of them, and this made things worse, werebelieved (and in many cases this was indeed true) to havecollaborated actively with Portuguese colonial power, and theywere credited as having taken undue benefits from that, a moredubious claim For MPLA militants, they also represented

“politically retrograde” entities that the party in power felthistorically obligated to eradicate At any rate, a healthy dose of

Realpolitik, nevertheless quickly imposed itself: “traditional

chiefs” were needed As a result, during the 1st Republic (and this

really lasted until 1991), if the sobas were excluded (as they

were, for example, in Moçambique), they were certainly thetarget of much distrust Like elsewhere in Africa, in Angola thesituation was lived in a complex duality of distancing andopportunism This need percolated slowly but surely, in Angola

as elsewhere in Africa, with or without civil wars

By the 1980s such needs were hard to ignore And it gotworse: the ruptures that came about in the late 80s and early 90scaused a tectonic shift In effect, it was already becoming evident

in the mid-80s that a “third generation” of analyses was fated toarise, if indeed the pattern of tightly coordinated response oftheoretical framing to empirical fact was to remain Thegeneralized disaster to which most post-colonial Stateexperiences in Africa amounted, were making themselves veryloudly and painfully felt indeed It is not an overstatement toassert that African States had by then started to face, for the first

time since their creation a generation earlier, a profoundlegitimacy crisis And an apparently insurmountable one ofefficacy too, in purely functional terms: by and large, andsometimes dramatically, they became blatantly incapable ofdoing what they were meant to do: govern The difficulties madethemselves mainly felt in the remote hinterlands In coordinatedsynchronicity, as could be expected, local chiefs, by then quite

significantly called throughout the Continent “local authorities”

became again the focus of analytical interest for both academicsand political leaders

Throughout the 1980s, in fact, in the political normativeplane, attempts at codifying the relations between States and

“local authorities” thickened over Africa In Angola the process(re)started somewhere in the mid-80s This happened even inthose cases (like Moçambique) were repression had been therule In the context of a growing State failure, not surprisinglylocal political and legal entities were to rapidly become essentialplayers in the local, the regional, and the national political game

The “African Renaissance” (a term famously trumpeted byJohn Harbeson) of a Continent in the throes of “democratictransitions” in the early 90s, reframed the issue of central-localrelationships according to the new political bibles which landedsouth of the Sahara The repositioning of “local authorities” (or

rather, “traditional authorities”, as significantly they began to be called) in analytical fora now responded to a variety of pressures,

and they were pressures coming from different directions.Empirically the “chiefs” were being reborn, due largely to Stateinefficacy Politically and administratively they regainedcentrality in States pushed, in many cases, to the edge of chaos.Programmatically, the local leaders were now deemed essentialfor an effective fruition of the new dogmas of Good Governance

In Angola, this plethora of constraints joined hands withthe new critical conjunctures which resulted from the return ofUNITA to war, for the first time occupying cities, and effectivelyremoving much of the territory and population fromgovernmental control In many regions, State presence simplydisappeared Even in regions under nominal State tutelage, theAngolan government was rapidly becoming incapable of exertingits power, or even maintaining much of a governance role,

however thin A fast growing military debt, rampant anduncontrollable local corruption, and sheer managementirrationalities, rendered that inevitable A weakening of ties ofdependence of large portions and layers of the populationfollowed suit Many “habitual” clients saw their relationships tothe centre largely emptied of content Largely as a reaction tothese developments, in 199919 the Angolan State decided toreorganize itself, namely in what concerns relations between

“centre” and “periphery” “Traditional authorities” receiveduniforms20, in many cases four-wheel drive jeeps, and a monthlystipend The result was as could be expected By 2002, therewere 25,000 Angolan “traditional authorities” on the Statepayroll By 2004, the number had jumped to 35,000 We are now(early 2006) just over the 40,000 number21

Local chiefs thus returned with a bang, now couched as

“traditional authorities”, a politically correct title I shall comeback to in my last section At first sight, it might seem we arewitnessing a rebirth of a long due replay of an interest and carefor forgotten entities unfairly submerged by the winds of history

It was anything but that “Chiefs” had been studied byresearchers keen on “laboratory discoveries” From the mid-90sonwards what should perhaps be called “neo-Chiefs” were beingcreated and propped up by central State powers hoping (andfighting) for an expansion of their own clienteles

19 The essential legal diploma here was the Decreto-Lei 17/99, dated 29th November 1999, which restructured the relations between the “central” and the “peripheric” administration”, insuring, as against the “democratic centralism” of old, a rapid “deconcentration” and

“decentralization” of State functions In February 2002, the Counsel of Ministers approved

a “strategic plan” to regulate and carry it out At the lowest level, “autarchies” [Municípios,

Comunas, Bairros (urban) and Povoações (rural)] were created, at least in the books All,

except for some of the Povoações, are under “direct State administration” For Povoações

with “traditional authorities” the administrative design is still in blueprint It will probably

be a composite of “direct” and “indirect administration”, even if it ends up as formally being Constitutionally couched as wholly “direct” For a fairly detailed description and

analysis, see Armando Marques Guedes et al (2003).

20 Something which, in any case came from colonial times In the mid-1980s, the Angolan independent State redesigned the uniforms down to their last detail See N’Gunu Tiny about this, below, for references to the legislation pertaining to the matter.

21 The numbers are the official ones I was given by the Angolan Minister and Vice-Minister

of Internal Administration and which were confirmed to me by the Office of the Angolan President In the State payroll, the “Chiefs” are entitled to stipend they receive for their role

as recognized “traditional authorities”.

A second step (or “wave”, to maintain my earlierterminology) of the “third generation” of analyses was fastcoming to fruition Their application point is, from a certainperspective, the position “traditional authorities” fill asintermediaries for the State But from another angle, it mightbetter be envisaged as the role they fulfil as half-way pointsbetween the “local” and the “central” At any rate, what is clear isthat in this latter “third generation” it is no longer the “local”, northe State that call upon themselves analytical attention, but ratherthe complex pattern of the multiplex relationships establishedbetween the two and more and more seen as constitutive of both.Again, this obviously reflects the profoundly changedcircumstances on the ground.

The outcome is well known Studies nowadayscharacteristically treat as problems old dichotomies like thatwhich contrasts the “local” with the “national”, the one opposing

“modernity” and “tradition”, or the more diffuse counterpointslevelled between “development” and “stasis”, or perhaps

“depression”, or even “regression” , by casting them as first andforemost relational and inter-constitutive entities In the greatmajority of contemporary cases, authors look at “traditionalauthorities” somewhat tongue-in-cheek, recasting them as localpolitical agents embedded in thick and ever-widening networks,who compete for ascendance and domination by playing thecards of their privileged relationships to the centre, and do soaccording to ever-changing politico-cultural coordinates

Even from a strictly ethnographic perspective this is not,

by any means, a surprising development The new emergent

“traditional authorities” are really in essence “organized localagents”, and ones whose profile is often quite atypical Theyassume many facets, simply because they are little more than

“local political actors”, and nowadays, in modern post-bipolarAfrica, such actors come in many guises Analysts have as a rulecome to more fully recognize this in the last few years At first,researches became aware that different kinds of political actorsare ever faster populating modern local African scenarios,sometimes geared to economic motivations, at other times driven

by political savvy, some of them guided by religious or mysticalfinalities, a few with medico-sanitary agendas Some are young

and some are women, and this is new too They are all starting to

be recognized at the local and central levels as agents on theirown merits, dwelling in profoundly changed scenarios whichappear to be in flux State pro-active moves are indeed at workand help change even further these scenarios, even if they hadwhat were largely unintended (or, rather, unexpected)consequences

Side by side with “Chiefs”, we now have a plethora ofwhat we should perhaps call “neo-Chiefs”, and these hardly fitthe classical mould They are indeed very different from, and inmany cases even antithetical, or antinomic to, the “traditional”entities of the past Their power is often not built-in as incharismatic leaders, but rather an outcome of their position askernels between cities and rural areas, between the generations ofthe old days and up and coming ones They often imposethemselves, in a kind of mechanical way, as interlocutors of theState and as go-betweens from the centres to the peripheries andfrom peripheries back to the centres Many times, they areconstrued, lock, stock and barrel, by States Not rarely, by

curious processes of bricolage, these emergent “notables”22

openly manipulate old status symbols and thus gain hugesupplements of legitimacy

Modern studies tend to focus on precisely such multipleaffiliations and the thick textures of these new political mediators

or “mutators”, and the means by which they creatively transcendthe informal nature of the diffuse powers they hold as a result ofbeing precisely that, creative intermediaries Key concepts in thenew theoretical and methodological agendas of researchers arethose of “arena”, “political field”, “spaces of interaction”,

“espace de notabilité”, “multiplicity of ties”, “informality”,

“networking” and, of course, the ever-present bricolage, that venerable Levi-Straussian terminological trouvaille for denoting

the patchwork processes of conceptual invention

It is therefore interestingly paradoxical – but entirelyunderstandable in terms of Herbst’s image of a dance between

22 A term coined in Francophone Africa, initially applicable to Muslim millieux, but with an

increasing adequacy applicable to other African stages In Angola, as in most of Africa, quite likely, many of the new Chiefs, in fact, emerged either from this curiously Weberian

“espace de notabilité” or moved rapidly into it.

local and central, and in terms of the tightening of relationshipsbetween the analyses carried out and the political agendas of thenew breeds of analysts (State and NGO ones) – that these oftenentirely novel entities should be called “traditional authorities”

by our early 21st Century African State leaders A point I shallreturn to in the last leg of the present communication

Before turning to my next section, let me stress that there

is nothing particularly new in my reading of the situation here:this is definitely not very far removed from what Rijk van Dijkand E Adriaan van Nieuwaal assert in very explicit and detailedintroductory pages to a collection of new African chieftaincy23

looked at in context In the scenarios of contemporary Africa, thenew roles of chiefs have been notably regarded by J.-F Bayart asforms of “mediation” and Pierre Bourdieu denotes as rathermechanisms of “mutational work” All this appears to be easilyapplicable to much of the Angolan socio-political landscape.Nevertheless changes are slow: in post-military UNITA Angola,

to use Trutz von Trotha’s terms24, while it is true that a para-statal

“civil chieftaincy” has been added to an “administrativechieftaincy”, in which, in many places, chiefs are still in theprocess of being incorporated into the State apparatus For vanDijk and van Nieuwaal, there is indeed “a new social andeconomic landscape for the mutational world of ‘chiefing’”25 vanDijk and van Nieuwaal continue, asserting that “the point is thatnot only should we stop emphasising the demise of Africanchieftaincy and its dependence on a politics of nostalgia, but weshould also no longer hold it to be ‘traditional’, a residual ofsomething authentic”26 Tasty food for thought

2

23 Rijk van Dijk and E Adriaan van Nieuwaal (1999): 7, in E Adriaan van Nieuwaal and

Rijk van Dijk (1999), African Chieftaincy in a New Socio-PoliticalLlandscape, African

Studies Centre, Leiden, Lit.

24 Trutz von Trotha (1996), “From administrative to civil chieftaincy Some problems and

prospects of African chieftaincy”, Journal of Legal Pluralism (37-38): 79-107.

25 Rijk van Dijk and E Adriaan van Nieuwaal, idem.

26 Ibid

As a second step, I want to produce and discuss a fewrelatively high-resolution pictures of these novel scenarios incontemporary Angola Here, then, are the four case-stories Ichose to expound on and examine The first three were collected

in Angola (in Huambo and its environs, namely in a refugee

camp, Casseque 3) in 2002 (Case-story 2) and 2003 (Case-story

1 as well as 3) The fourth (Case-story 4) I put together in 2004and 2005, based on conversations, newspaper references and a

long Acórdão of the Angolan Supreme Court Unfolding “social

dramas”, as Victor Turner would call them and as they certainlywere, the stories, although they have a juridical focus of sortsbestowed on them, involve a degree of contextualization thatallows me to articulate events in the local framework in whichevents took place and were lived, interpreted and understood, aninclusion from which conclusions were locally drawn andmeasures taken

Case story 1

In November 2002, in Cabata, a small aggregate of hamlets

located within the Sambo Comuna, in the Planalto Central, a resident man accused of “witchcraft” (feitiçaria was the

Portuguese term used) was severely beaten by the localpopulation The spanking was violent but not quite fatal Thereason we were given was pragmatic: there was a general fearthat the Angolan State would view the event as a case ofhomicide, and as a result convict the people involved asmurderers We did not actually witness the physical aggression of

the feiticeiro; but what presumably took place (and, I repeat, the

information is both thin and indirect, as to this) was a last second

intervention by the local soma, or of someone with substantial authority over the angry populace, which in extremis stopped the

difficult conundrum – or so he told us – the Administrador

declared himself “incompetent” in what concerns a “crime”(witchcraft) that Angolan law does not recognize, and thusrefused to take cognizance of the matter Nevertheless, he did notput an end to the issue either, and namely did nothing along thelines of holding the Cabata residents responsible for an act ofaggression, or anything else that might resolve it; claiming not toreally know what to do, he preferred to ignore the problem andlet it “follow its own course” Even when faced with the choice

of sending the beaten man for medical treatment, he decided thatdoing so would “send the wrong signal” and thus avoided thattoo

The matter did not end there Looking for a solution, the

soma and his followers next walked for a few days, dragging the witch along, to present him, and their case, to the “Rei” of Sambo, Cipriano Kaningi, a big regional soma inene Cipriano Kaningi, controls (or at least then did) forty-eight ombalas (courts, in Portuguese cortes), and has, or rather then had, twenty-one “counselors” (the sekulos) Kaningi, the soma inene, like the Administrador before him, was cautious, and declared himself incompetent on the matter He gave as a reason the origin of the man accused He was a native if another Kingdom, the neighbouring one of Huambo, and that, the soma decided,

waswhere he should be “brought to justice”

When, after another long trip, the cortége arrived at the hamlet of the Rei of Huambo, the latter finally decided the man should be send to the remote Comuna of Chipeio, in the Município of Ecunha, a rather remote place under Huambo

jurisdiction, where, by “royal decision”, he was ostracised for lifefor his “crimes” as a witch As far as we know this is where heremains to this day

Case story 2

This second case took place a few years ago, in 1999, also in

Mbundu-inhabited Planalto Central where Huambo is located, but this time in the Comuna of Mungo, then under UNITA occupation The local soma, a minor chief, a reputed government

and MPLA sympathizer, left for Luanda as soon as his land wasoccupied by the insurgent movement, and a potentiallytroublesome power vacuum ensued.

In a deeply divided local context, with most residents loyal

to the newly displaced and disempowered governmentalauthorities, and with the new strongmen “landlords” faced withthe urgency of a political solution that would help guaranteesome stability and a minimal measure of control, a rare andprofoundly exceptional step was taken: with UNITA support,

three women ascended to the position of soma Although

kinship-wise, at least in terms of their direct lineage affiliation, the three

women were close relatives to the departed soma, this was

something that apparently had never happened before, so wewere told, at least in living memory

With the benefit of hindsight, what happened next waspredictable With the death of Jonas Savimbi, the signature of theMemorandum for Peace and the effective end of hostilities, the

soma returned home, travelling back from Luanda to Mungo.

Upon arrival, he was faced with an unexpected scenario Thesolution was quick and forceful With the decisive help of the

new government-appointed Administrador, António Cavindi, an

MPLA militant, the three women were summarily disinvested of

all their powers The old soma was re-installed, and new ombalas and sekulos (all men, and all of them of the right ascendancy as

well as of the correct national political affiliation, of course) wererapidly empowered as successors to the ladies

The reasons given for this political act were veryinteresting: it was claimed – and this received strong localsupport in Mungo – that women tended to be incorrigibly self-interested and potentially very powerful witches with access todangerous sources of huge mystical powers, and therefore

undesirable somas, even if minor ones in small ombalas As a

curious side-note, it is worth remarking that the substitutioncarried out, although it was (or so it seems) well received inMungo, was not unanimous in local and regional governmental

circles affected to the MPLA: the municipal Administrador, for

example, who presented himself as a “progressive modernist”

[“um progressista moderno”] in a long conversation he had with

me, opposed the substitution as “politically abusive” and

“retrograde” He was nevertheless outmanoeuvred and as a resultquickly reposted elsewhere, out of harms’ way.

Case story 3

As a third case, I chose a judicial form we came upon at a

governmental refugee camp, Casseque 3, also in the Planalto Central of Angola, this time some mere 40 kilometres from the

provincial capital, Huambo It is a case I have discussedelsewhere in much greater detail27, but which is not inadequatehere, so I shall briefly resume it Up until the Summer of 2002,

Casseque 3 held some 2,500 refugees.; by August, the number

had dwindled to a few hundred, most people having slowlypercolated back to their places of origin, some having trekked toLuanda, a trip of a few months

In the camp we met a young man, António Pinto, named

by the Provincial Governor as the MPLA “coordinator for

culture”; he was the de facto camp leader, capable of mobilizing

the authorities through his political affiliations, and recognized

by his co-residents since he has kin to the departed soma, who

had left to a Luanda suburb for a better life António Pinto, abudding “traditional authority” in the absence of his relative,

assured the connections between the Casseque 3 residents and the local government authorities (namely the Delegados Provinciais for the various Angolan central Ministries, and the local Administradores); internally, as it were, he also fulfilled an

essential role as a leader of the disparate group of peoplecongregated there in rather harsh conditions

Let me focus on this last role Perhaps understandably,conflicts were not uncommon, given the severely difficult andvery unusual conditions; conditions in which unrelated, or onlydistantly connected, persons were forced to cohabit in closequarters in extreme deprivation, and doing so in the midst ofstrangers resident in the camp neighbourhood According tolocals (and this was confirmed by António Pinto), the bulk of

27 Namely in a book, in which I had some of my students, as well as two Angolan Law Professors as my co-authors, and also in a longish article I wrote for a Portuguese Law

Journal, Jub-Judice The references for these are Armando Marques Guedes et al (2003),

and Armando Marques Guedes (2005)

contentious issues that occurred centred on marital disputesarising from rampant infidelity, witchcraft accusations betweenaccidental neighbours, drunkenness and the usually associatedruckuses, and petty thefts carried out by camp residents inestablished hamlets and agricultural fields in the vicinity Findingsolutions for “cases” arising in these fronts forms the core ofAntónio Pinto’s “judicial leadership” efforts and, ultimately, ofhis “local governance” functions This usually implied passing alot of “judgements” and thus assuming the role of local pacifier.Interestingly, when cases were too complex, or involved deaths

or particularly grievous consequences, António Pinto was littlemore than a recognized go-between, since the acceptedmechanism then was simply to call on the never too distantAngolan State authorities to take charge of the occurrences

The way he carries this judicial and political mission out isfascinating I shall merely focus on the less complex cases

According to local narratives, the soma, now in Luanda – the

man Pinto substituted – operated judicially according to the localtraditional canon, if such is a fair description, in what concernsdispute institutions Allow me to give some highlights of such

“classical” modus operandi When conflicts arose, the soma called the sekulos to an open django, and there they heard the

story of the dispute as told by “elders” who, it is said, “represent

the parts” This was done in front of the “litigants” (who did not

intervene directly), and in the presence of as many co-residents

as might wish to attend After this first round, the “defensewitnesses” (I am, of course, rather abusively translating here the

local term, ocyame) were heard, followed by the “prosecuting” ones (known as epindikiso) The soma, for the purposes fulfilling

his allotted role as “head of the tribunal” (in vernacular, acting as

muenlekanga) then made up his mind about what to do to “solve”

the “case” at hand, usually, I was told, by attempting a negotiatedsolution which the sides would freely accept as that, a solution.This is the model António Pinto chose for the resolution of

disputes when the soma left to the capital.

He nevertheless decided to introduce some modifications

to the inherited template, let me call it that After listening to the

“witnesses” (the ocyame and the epindikiso), António Pinto,

perhaps simply giving expression to his own notions of political

participation, or perhaps eager to insure the legitimacy of hiseventual decision, whatever it might be, went for a popular vote

of sorts Following the formal traditional interventions of the

ocyame and the epindikiso, all people present in the django were

invited to speak up on the matter at hand and, as a result, abarrage of “defenses, attacks, and criticism” ensued, which both

he and the people present took in eagerly Only then did he reach

a final decision, which he announced

In my talk with the young “cultural coordinator”, the

acting muenlekanga, who obviously felt the solution he came up

with to be both justified and necessary, the enormous pride hetook in an addition which he clearly deemed political correct andadvantageous in terms of judicial efficacy, was evident Heforcefully explained to me that by virtue of his rather informal

and wide “popular consultations”, more “in-depth

considerations” (considerandos de fundo, was the precise rhetorical, and eminently political, tour de phrase he used) were

brought into play, a contextualization which allowed people tobetter bring the matter into focus It seemed clear to me that heviewed his innovations as half-way between a straightforwardform of direct and very public popular consultation and a session

of “revolutionary critique”, and when I suggested this to him heenthusiastically agreed with the diagnostic As a result of his

“democratizing enlargement” [the term is mine, not his], his

“sentencing was always complied with” by the camp residents of

Casseque 3 I had no means of confirming this diagnosis.

Case story 4

This is perhaps the most interesting and wider-reaching of mycase-stories At any rate, it is most certainly the widest ranging inimplications It occurred in South-Eastern Angola in the last days

of August 2002, in the huge and very remote and sparselypopulated Province of Cuando-Cubango (in Portuguese colonial

times it was the region was popularly known as the terras do fim

do Mundo, literally “the lands of world´s end”) The events

unfolded barely a few months after Jonas Savimbi was killed andimmediately after the signing of the Peace Memorandum which

put an end to the long and brutal Angolan civil war The story is,

I believe, both paradigmatic and edifying

In late August some local Ngangela-speaking chieftains

(widely known as sobas, although that is not the local name for

them), led by “King” Bingo-Bingo, asked to be received in theprovincial capital, Menongue, by the Provincial Governor,Fernando Biwango With them they brought eight other local

sobas, which they accused of witchcraft The accused were tied

and bound and showed signs of violent aggression The

delegation of “traditional authorities” asked the Governador for

the immediate imprisonment of the eight accused men andwanted them sent to the prison camp of Bentiaba, isolated in themidst of the Northern Kalahari desert, in Northern Namibe, in thefar South-West of Angola

According to the chieftains in the Bingo-Bingo party, therewere numerous eye-witnesses to the fact the eight men made ittheir common practice to kill people in the hinterland and then

“using them (or rather, their ‘spirits’) as slaves” in their ownagricultural plots and in their fishing endeavours This meant, itwas alleged, the “witches” (according to the Supreme Courtrecords of February 2005, the term used was the Ngangela one of

kamutukuleni, which, in the absence of a better rendition the high

court decided to translate as “witchcraft”) “thrived, against theindigence of the other inhabitants of the region”28 Naturally, boththe practices and their consequences were deemed unacceptable,

and the sobas wanted the eight men removed for good.

Perhaps feeling uneasy, Governador Biwango refused the

request to have the men sent to the Bentiaba desert camp,invoking “a non-conformity of the accusations to the extantlaw”29 Nevertheless, the Governador, Fernando Biwango,

28 I am following here, quite closely, the court records pertaining to this case, those relative

to Processo nº 3146, of the Tribunal Supremo de Angola The Supreme Court, in its February 2005 decision, talked about the use of “pessoas já falecidas” [people already deceased], who were used “como escravos” [as slaves], the witches “progredindo [assim] a

olhos vistos, perante a indigência dos demais habitantes da região” [thriving to the naked

eye, as against the indigence of the other inhabitants o0f the region].

29 In the words of the Acórdão of the Angolan Supreme Court, “esta proposta (do ‘rei’

Bingo-Bingo e dos seus acompanhantes) não encontrou acolhimento do senhor Governador Provincial, por alegada não conformação com as leis vigentes” [this proposal

of King Bingo-Bingo and his followers did not get a positive reception by the Governor, by

an alleged non-conformity to extant laws].