Abstract

Colonial rule did not eradicate the key social and political institutions of indigenous societies. Their continued existence, although often in forms substantially transformed since the precolonial period, still plays a major role in shaping the specific trajectories of nation-building in postcolonial states. Among these institutions are the so-called traditional rulers. During the first decades following decolonization, governments in many postcolonial countries sought to deprive "indigenous rulers" of political authority as part of broader attempts to overcome ethnicity in the name of nation-building. Yet "indigenous authorities" proved remarkably resilient. Their endurance was rooted not only, or even primarily, in their practical effectiveness under modern conditions, but in the persistent legitimacy they retained in the public consciousness. At the same time, the postcolonial states of Africa, Asia, and Oceania have witnessed neither a straightforward restoration nor simple preservation of precolonial indigenous political institutions. Rather, these institutions have undergone further transformation, driven by the fundamental fact that, as in the colonial period, they no longer represent sovereign polities but are incorporated into modern — and postmodern — state structures. By the 1990s, it had become evident that a more realistic and effective approach was not to await the disappearance of "chiefs" and "kings", nor to exclude them from postcolonial political systems as collaborators of colonial powers or as obsolete symbols of backwardness. Instead, the prevailing tendency was to integrate them into those systems, encourage the bureaucratization of "indigenous" institutions, and redirect them toward "modern" national objectives, while continuing to concentrate substantive political power in the institutions of the nation-state. Such integration, in turn, offered a means of overcoming tribalism as an obstacle to nation-building. Tribalism becomes an impediment to nation-building only where, owing to a lack of historical preconditions and deliberate policies on the part of "modern authorities", "indigenous authorities" have not been effectively incorporated into the political system of the postcolonial state. The continued existence of indigenous political institutions, therefore, does not in itself constitute a threat to the formation of a postcolonial nation-state.