Grassroots Governance?: Chiefs in Africa and the Afro-Caribbean

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Despite its title, this book devotes considerably more space to Africa
than to the Caribbean, and with good reason. Arguably, African culture
in the Americas is not very strong outside Haiti and Jamaica. Most
Jamaicans, says Professor Werner Zips of the University of Vienna, had
Ghanaian ancestors, and enough of them (known as Maroons) escaped into
the island’s almost inaccessible Cockpit Country. In 1738–39,
British authorities signed treaties that granted them a considerable
measure of autonomy. Whether they should have retained that autonomy
after Jamaican independence in 1962 has been a controversial issue.
Descendants of the Maroons claim that there was no expiry date on the
18th-century treaties and that Jamaica’s head of state, Queen
Elizabeth II, is not really a Jamaican. One solution may be the
Jamaicanization of the island’s Constitution. This reviewer doubts
whether that would solve the problem. Even without constitutional
change, Jamaica has become decreasingly British and increasingly
independent since 1962, but such changes apparently have made little
impression on the descendants of the Maroons.

The editors present African case studies from Ghana and from the
southernmost African countries of Lesotho, Botswana, and South
Africa—like Jamaica, all members of the Commonwealth. They include
pictures of African royalty and deal with African systems of government
before, during, and since the colonial era. Editor Donald Ray explains
that the existence of a chief or king does not render a society
intrinsically undemocratic. Despite British high-handedness toward
slaves until the 1830s, the United Kingdom and Canada today are probably
as democratic as the republican United States. Many African chiefs have
lost much if not all of their authority since their countries gained
independence, but the successor states have not necessarily become
democracies. Ray calls on his readers to approach his book with open
minds. Scholars both African and non-African have written the various
chapters.

The book’s primary appeal would be to cultural anthropologists and
those interested in societies of Africans and the African diaspora.