Challenging Authorities: Ethnographies of Legitimacy and Power in Eastern and Southern Africa

When the notion of ‘alternative facts’ and the alleged dawning of a ‘postfactual’ world entered public discourse, social anthropologists found themselves in unexpectedly familiar territory. In theirempirical experience, fact—knowledge accepted as true—derives its salience from social mechanisms of legitimization, thereby demonstrating a deep interconnection with power and authority. In thisperspective, fact is a continually contested and volatile social category. Due to the specific histories of their colonial and post-independence experience, African societies offer a particularly broad array of insights into social processes of juxtaposition, opposition, and even outright competition between different postulated authorities. The contributions to the present volume explore the variety of ways in which authority is contested in Southern and Eastern Africa, investigating localized discourses on which institution, what kind of knowledge, or whose expertise is accepted as authoritative, thus highlighting the specificities and pluralities in ‘modern’ societies. This edited volume engages with larger theoretical questions regarding power and authority in the context of (post)colonial states (neo)traditional authority, claiming space, conflict and (in)justice, and contestations of knowledge. It offers in-depth critical analyses of ethnographic data that put contemporary African phenomena on equal footing with current controversies in North America, Europe, and other global settings.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Investigating Authority and Its Legitimization in Contemporary Africa.- Part 1. Power and the (Post)Colonial State. 2. Whose State? Whose Nation? Representations of the History of the Arab Slave Trade and Nation-Building in Tanzania.- 3. Between Ethnicity and Medicine: Reinventing Legitimacy in Chokwe and Sukuma Chieftaincies.- Part 2. Contested Authorities and State Power.- 4. By What Authority? Cosmology, Legitimacy, and the Sources of Power in Malawi.- 5. Bittamo: The Duties of Authority in Kara, Southern Ethiopia.- 6. In Search of Democracy: gadaa as a Political Idea – Or, the Legitimacy of Traditional Authority in Times of Turmoil and Unease.- 7. Contested Authorities, External Experts and the Quest for Social Justice: Negotiating Basic Income Grants in an African Setting.-8. Challenging Neotraditional Authority in Namibia.- Part 3. Power and Authority over Space.- 9. Changes in Ethnicity and Land Rights among the !Xun of North-central Namibia.- 10. San Traditional Authorities, Communal Conservancies, Conflicts, and Leadership in Namibia.- 11. Sacred Spaces, Legal Claims: Competing Claims for Legitimate Knowledge and Authority over the Use of Land in Nharira Hills, Zimbabwe.- Part 4. Conflict, (In)Justice, and Plural Legitimacies.- 12.  Magic Momentum: Negotiating Authority in the Bongolava Region, Madagascar.- 13. Ungoverned Spaces and Informalisation of Violence: The Case of Kenya Police Reservists (KPRs) in Baragoi.- 14. Who Calls the Tune? Submission, Evasion and Contesting Authorities in Ethiopian Refugee Camps.- Part 5. Secret Authority and the State.- 15. Secrecy and Visibility: Challenging Verwoerdism in South Africa’s 20th Century.- 16. Legitimizing the Illegitimate: How Ethnologists Fashioned Namibia.

About the Author :
Arne S. Steinforth is Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Previously, he has been Senior Research Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster, Germany. His research and prior publications focus on issues of mental disorder and society as well as power, politics, and cosmology in Southern Africa. Sabine Klocke-Daffa is Senior Researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, Germany. She has been Deputy Professor at various German universities and is a principal investigator of the Tübingen Collaborative Research Center “ResourceCultures”, funded by the German Research Foundation. She has done intensive research in Southern Africa focusing on social, political, and religious issues.  ​