Professor Ndangwa Noyoo Comments On The Barotseland Issue

Barotseland is seeking the peaceful resolution of its legal status under international law before the PCA, although Zambia appears to be intent on blocking all attempts at peaceful arbitration to resolve this long-running issue, which has existed since the birth of Zambia as a State.

Barotseland was a sophisticated and highly functional pre-Colonial African nation, which survived the Colonial period under the British intact only to be brought to its knees by Kenneth Kaunda, the first President of Zambia, which tried unsuccessfully to dismantle it by such measures as erasing its name and replacing it with the generic title “Western Region.”

Professor Ndangwa Noyoo’s recent work, entitled “Indigenous systems of governance and post-colonial Africa: The case of Barotseland,” provides an interesting analysis of the Barotseland issue, and the impact of colonialism on the sophisticated forms of governance that were in place, and fully functional, prior to the Colonial period.

You will find an abstract of his article, as well as the full article, below.

Indigenous systems of governance and post-colonial Africa: The case of Barotseland

By Ndangwa Noyoo, Associate Professor, Department of Social Work, University of Johannesburg

Abstract:

Africa is littered with examples of failed governance systems, arguably, primarily due to the fact that the post-colonial state is itself a caricature of European states. This paper contends that African post-colonial states and their forms of governance – which were exported to Africa via colonialism – have failed to resonate with the lives of the mass of the people in Africa, because they are not rooted in the continent’s indigenous socio-political and economic structures. Unlike other non-Western parts of the world, where countries have sought to mainstream their indigenous governance systems into modern ones, by fusing them with those of their former colonial masters, African countries have consistently eschewed their own historical realities in this matter, due to perhaps sectional and vested interests. Undoubtedly, some pre-colonial African societies had created advanced political and economic systems which had generated cohesion amongst different assimilated ethnic groups. Some kingdoms had even unified heterogeneous ethnic polities into unitary self-governing entities. This paper pays attention to post-colonial Africa’s inability to make use of some of the positive attributes of pre-colonial Africa’s indigenous governance systems, probably due to the continent’s leaders’ lack of foresight or plain selfishness. The former may also have led to the pursuit of disjointed development programmes, which only aped those of the West. In the final analysis, that may be the reason why many sub-Saharan African nations are failing dismally to meet the needs of their citizens today. Using the case of Barotseland as an example, the paper argues that there is something that can be gleaned from this nation’s glorious past and which can serve as a lesson to contemporary efforts aimed at governing African countries.