8 - Regulating depredation: chiefs and the military, 1963–2005

Summary

Chiefs are like the door to a chicken house: without it the chickens would not be safe.

During periods of civil war, the urban frontier dramatically constricted around the government garrisons, and its inhabitants found themselves caught between two antagonistic ‘hakumas’, the rebel government in the ‘bush’ and the government in the town. Both bush and town were ambiguous moral spaces, and the chiefs and their communities wrestled with how to gain protection from or in them, during both the first and second periods of war. The communities that had crystallised by the late-colonial period in the vicinity of the towns were frequently divided and scattered to different locations. The institution of chiefship had to be similarly mobile and capable of temporary splitting; yet in the process it became ever more entrenched in the political and social architecture, so that people could rarely imagine their world without chiefs. Yet chiefs in certain times and places are seen to have acted variously as agents and informants of brutal security forces, as executors of military requisitioning and conscription, as easily-bribed collaborators, as corrupt beneficiaries of commercial, development and relief projects, or as feeble victims of military power. Chiefs were killed by rebel forces, removed by their communities and imposed by governments. Chiefdoms became fragmented into ever smaller units, as the next chapter will discuss.