Much of British colonial Africa was governed through a network of local Africans who “bought in” to the colonial project. This took two main forms. One was to capture the Native those seats of native authority that could not be suppressed outright, and then re-fashion them to serve the colonial mission. Another was to simply invent new seats of authority and then smuggle them into “tradition”.

This system was based on the idea that African minds were so simple that one individual with quasi-traditional authority was all that was needed to manage native problems.

These hybrid chiefs, holding titles such as “Village Headman”, or “Warrant Chief” are in many ways the predecessors to the dictators who came after African independence, who often exploit and excavate bastardized notions of African “tradition” to continue exercising power in the interests of Western powers and their powerful corporations, while invoking “African” imagery, and suppressing the actual native African institutions. This is the culture of the African-president-as-chief.