African Traditional Customs’ Potentialities and Dilemmas: Conflict over Thanksgiving to Chiefs in Zimbabwean Rural Villages

The transformation of society towards modernity and the attendant socio-economic challenges it has imposed on African societies have compelled insensitive traditional structures of governance to hijack traditional customs and practices to serve their ulterior motives. Thanksgiving to chiefs (kubika chiutsi, in Shona language), is one such traditional practice that has been manipulated to serve the self-aggrandizement of Zimbabwean traditional chiefs in rural areas under the guise of subjects’ gratitude expression to traditional authority. We employ benevolent theory as a theoretical lens to unravel both the potentialities and the dilemmas that surround this highly contentious practice. While acknowledging thanksgiving to chiefs as an adhesive that tightly bounds subordinates to established traditional authority thus fostering a cohesive society in ancient times, we argue that in contemporary Zimbabwe, the practice unfolds as benevolent despotism (by chiefs) unleashed on pauperised masses. Many rural people conceive thanksgiving to chiefs as an idealized version of the “tragedy of the commons” as chiefs misconstrue them (subjects) for tradable communally owned commodities. Drawing on our reflections of our experiences in Zimbabwe, our argument is that the tradition of thanksgiving is riddled with absurdities, injustices and abuses-itself a crime against humanity committed by African chiefs veneered by relentless pursuit of tradition and custodianship. The paper thus contributes to the African cultural practices and mainstream human rights debates in Zimbabwe predicated on the contradictions between preservation of traditional customs and forces of change towards modernity.