State Recognition of Traditional Authority in Mozambique

The PhD dissertation, State Recognition of Traditional Authority. Authority, Citizenship and State Formation in Rural Post-War Mozambique, explores the apparently surprised return of de jure authority to traditional leaders during the liberal democratic transition in Mozambique and what this implies locally for de facto practices and claims to authority and citizenship. It does this by first analysing the longer history and the national policy-making process preceding legislation on traditional authority. Secondly, it investigates how legislation was put into practice and reacted to in Matica and Dombe, two rural and former war-zones in the central part of Mozambique. A particular focus is on the fields of policing and justice enforcement.

The dissertation argues that the democratic transition provided an important context and vocabulary for legitimising the decision to formally recognise traditional authority. However, in practice the official promise of rural democratisation was averted by other political agendas and processes. Legislation was appropriated by local state officials to reorder existing chieftaincies as an element of consolidating state sovereignty and the power of the ruling party Frelimo in the rural hinterlands. This underpinned a reproduction of the post-colonial party-state, and political exclusion of those people supporting the opposition party, Renamo. In everyday interactions between chiefs, local state officials and ordinary citizens this goal was met by contradictions and transformations, however. It was not only the chiefs who adapted to the demands of the local state. Local state officials also adjusted their everyday operations to the local context. This gave way to mutual transformations of how the chiefs and the local state officials exercised and claimed authority. The key to understanding this was that traditional and state authority was, and had been for a long time, constituted relationally. They competed for sovereign authority over central areas of social life, while also being caught in a relationship of interdependence. It was through a productive tension between attempts to congeal distinct domains of state and chiefly authority and multiple practical and ideological fusions that the authority of each was constituted.

The result were hybrid and negotiated forms of state and traditional authority, but also high levels of uncertainty in the exercise of authority. Authority remained essentially precarious. The flipside of this uncertainty was a local state that ultimately relied on extra-legal practices, political exclusion and force to deal with the frailty of Frelimo-state authority. For people in Matica and Dombe the result was conditional citizenship. Access to services, recognition and influence depended on the ability to engage in negotiating settlements with chiefs and local state officials, and was ultimately conditional on allegiance to the Frelimo party - not on their formal rights as citizens.

State Recognition of Traditional Authority
Authority, Citizenship and State Formation in Rural Post-War Mozambique
Helene Maria Kyed

Ph.D Dissertation, 2007, Roskilde University Centre

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