Decentralization in Africa and the resilience of traditional authorities: Evaluating Zimbabwe’s track record

Zimbabwe has undergone various phases of institutional reform during colonial and post-colonial times either co-opting, distorting or denying the presence of traditional authorities, but somehow none of these institutional engineering episodes managed to uproot them. What in fact happened is successive waves of political institutions designed and put in place during these reforms withered away. Zimbabwe’s traditional authorities are still there and they continue to play a big role in the daily lives of rural populations.This paper looks at one of the most important endogenous factors influencing the workings of decentralization in Zimbabwe. Successive waves of formal institutional change that took place during Zimbabwe’s colonial and post-colonial history have been unable able to uproot the influence of traditional leaders. Due to their home-grown legitimacy, various traditional authorities continue to play an ever-present role in the lives of people in rural areas. But, as it is the case throughout most of Africa, the powers of traditional leaders have mostly been uncodified under modern law and these power relations tend to be rather informal and culturally inaccessible to most outsiders. Consequently, the scholarly literature has not been able to systematically acknowledge their pervasive influence. The article concludes with a reflection on how the influence of traditional authorities can be translated into the democratic and progressive empowerment of rural populations in the developing world