When Philosophy Reconsiders the African Palaver

A different political myth

The African palaver rests on an African political myth that seems more effective than those of ‘permanent cunning’ or the ‘war of everyone against everyone’, which have underlain political power and its exercise in the West since the sixteenth century and are respectively found in Machiavelli and Hobbes.

The palaver owes its existence neither to revelation, charity nor morality. It rests entirely on a myth for resolving social tensions and political rivalry that privileges compromise. Every society—whether ‘hot’ or ‘cold’, to use Lévi-Strauss’s disputed categories—is dynamic, and competition exists even among poor people living in contexts described statistically as ‘stable poverty’.

From the founder-god to the warrior-chief

At first in Africa, power belonged to the founder-god whom tradition calls the ancestor. It later became the monopoly of the great warrior who replaced the founder-god as chief of the tribe or clan, generally after an offence caused the god to withdraw from human beings.

One function of tradition is to bridge this original break between the founder-god and humanity through an appropriate liturgy that makes the god present again, though often invisibly to ordinary people.

Two opposing regimes of power

The opposition between civil law and tradition must not be reduced to a formal contrast between two kinds of constraint imposed on people living in organised societies.

Civil law is a set of legal means founded on a myth that political power is effective only when centralised and perpetuated by a minority—whether of class, religion or even skin colour, as under apartheid in South Africa. African tradition rests on the opposing myth: political power is effective only when managed by all, in the name of all and close to those concerned.

Civil law and tradition thus belong to two regimes for exercising power whose effects are opposed.