South Africa’s traditional leaders, once scorned as ”servants” of the apartheid regime, have since had their powers legalised, but the chiefs say the government wants to take away control of what matters most — land.
The first multi-racial elections in 1994 saw local councillors voted in to administer the areas once controlled by the chiefs, sparking spirited debate on their roles in the new democracy.
Nevertheless, ”traditional leaders can speak to the government like equals today and the government listens,” said Kgosi Victor Suping, a traditional chief in Supingstad in the northwest.
”It was not like that in the apartheid years,” added Suping, who is also the deputy leader of the National House of Traditional Leaders (NHTL), a body that advises the government on traditional affairs.
But real power for the ”amakhosi” (Zulu for traditional leaders) lies in the land and this, said Suping, is where the government wants to cut their influence.
Under apartheid, 13% of South Africa’s most infertile land was set aside as black homelands or ”Bantustans”.
Legal control of tribal land was in the hands of white ”Bantu commissioners”, whom the ”amakhosi” served as advisers.
Parliament passed the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Bill late last year to codify the chiefs’ influence over their communities.
Today there are about 840 traditional authorities in South Africa, which have influence over 15 to 18 million people.
”Traditional leaders are the custodians of their people’s culture and land,” said Patekile Holomisa, the president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa.
”The government has realised that it cannot control the rural areas without having the traditional leaders on its side.”
The deputy minister of land affairs, Dirk du Toit, acknowledged this earlier this year, when he told reporters: ”If we want to get security, we must work with the traditional groups.”
But now parliament is debating another piece of legislation, the Communal Land Rights Bill. It will give traditional leaders the right to register property on behalf of their communities, but the minister of agriculture and land affairs will make the final decision on who is allocated territory.
”The institution of traditional leaders is based on land,” Suping said. ”Chiefs have always allocated it. If the communities felt that the chief was acting above his powers, they would rise up and say ‘no’.”
Suping said chiefs nowadays were more actively involved in their communities, such as in building schools and clinics and settling disputes, compared to the apartheid days when they were ”more like executives”.
”I sometimes get calls from women, saying their husbands are not treating them well. In our culture women are sacred, so I will intervene and help to settle the dispute.”
Critics say the government is entrenching the rights of leaders who collaborated with the apartheid regime in the oppression of their people.
”In modern times, the great majority of traditional leaders, with a few honourable exceptions, were the servants of the apartheid system,” political author Allister Sparks wrote in a recent article.
”Displease the chief and you and your family could be evicted with nowhere else to go,” he said.
Sparks concluded that entrenching their powers would ”make life infinitely worse for the 15-million overwhelmingly poor people who live in the former Bantustans”. ‒ Sapa-AFP