South Africa: Draft Traditional Laws Reimpose Colonial Logic

analysis

Draft laws currently before the president closely resemble previous versions of colonial and apartheid laws that locked African people into “tribal” reserves, under the authority of despotic forms of rule legitimated in the name of “tradition”. This was a colonial perversion of precolonial forms of politics that sought to encase African people in fixed and authoritarian ideas of “tradition”.

Scholars such as Paul Landau have explored the history of popular politics in precolonial times and shown that dynamism, rebellion and flight were always present. Strangers were accommodated, people frequently moved from one polity to another and identity was malleable. Landau shows, decisively, that the idea of the “tribe” was a colonial imposition.

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