Inkosi yinkosi ngabantu: an interrogation of governance in precolonial Africa - the case of the Ndebele of Zimbabwe

Abstract

At the beginning of 2000, African leaders began to talk of 'African solutions to African problems' as the way forward for the continent in the new millennium. In line with this thinking, then President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa began to articulate and popularize the African Renaissance as the guiding philosophy for African development. According to this philosophy, Africa's economic and political salvation was to come from the mobilization and deployment of positive aspects of African culture and history. It is in this context that this article engages with the central issue of precolonial forms of governance in Africa with a view to countering those ahistorical perspectives that unduly blamed precolonial African traditions and cultures for bequeathing a politics of disorder on the post-colonial state, together with those that romanticize precolonial forms of governance as a golden age of pristine democracy and consensual politics. This article offers a rebuttal to the emerging 'African exceptionalism' thesis. The central argument is that one cannot generalize about precolonial African systems of governance as they were not only diverse but also complex, allowing good and bad forms of governance to co-exist uneasily and tendentiously across space and time.