Tradition and Travesty: Chiefs and the Administration in Makoni District, Zimbabwe, 1960–1980

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Abstract
INTRODUCTION: During the first months of 19811 was in Makoni district, Zimbabwe, carrying out research on its twentieth-century history. I arrived there bearing a powerful letter of credit from the Minister of Local Government and, as a result, the District Commissioner allowed me to see his current files on chiefs and headmen. These files – far fatter than any that had survived from an earlier period in the National Archives – covered the period 1960 to 1980, with a scattering of earlier material. They were full of elaborately researched precolonial histories of the chiefdoms, the more elaborately researched the later in time they were compiled. They were also full of equally elaborate chiefly genealogies, often covering a dozen or so pages. The District Commissioner supposed that his files would be interesting to a historian because of these evidences of the past. But I soon came to realize that they were secondary to, and dependent upon, the relationship which the files really documented.

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