Book launch: The Politics of Custom - Chiefship, Capital and the State in Contemporary Africa

This path-breaking book explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa.

The Wits Institute for Economic and Social Research (WiSER) together with Wits University Press and the Harvard University Center for African Studies will host the launch of the book, The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital and the State in Contemporary Africa, edited by John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff. The launch will be followed by a discussion:

• Chair and opening comments: Professor Achille Mbembe
• Speakers: Rogers Orock, Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Dineo Skosana
• Respondents: John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff

This path-breaking volume explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises – from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers – but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that ‘traditional’ authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the 21st Century.

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