Mila na ntsi" and "la démocratie": Alternative political systems in the Comoro Islands

• Applicant: Dr. Iain Walker
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 571915249

This project seeks to further our understanding of the discourses and practices surrounding the conjunction of customary and Western colonial-legacy political systems and, more widely, non-European perspectives on the world. The colonial endeavour and the process of decolonisation put pressure on post-colonial states to conform to ostensibly more equitable international norms of democratic governance. However, the post-1989 shifts in political alignments and the growing recognition that alternative political systems are possible, have prompted many post-colonial states to question colonially-imposed norms of governance and (re)turn to customary systems, formally incorporating custom into the political process, particularly at a local level, both in Africa and elsewhere. The current contestation of many of the underlying precepts of the world order can only hasten this process. In the Comoro Islands the customary political process is collectively recognised and widely accepted, and is largely successful in local governance. This recognition is only possible because of common, shared and ubiquitous understandings of the principles upon which these systems are based: mila na ntsi, “tradition and land”, a framework that establishes social norms and provides parameters for practice. However, and although custom is no less effective and often more effective than its Western counterpart, it is formally excluded from the operation of the state: customary political elements can only operate informally alongside formal politico-legal systems founded upon Western democratic principles. Comorians frequently criticise custom for its undemocratic nature, dismissing it as the product of a feudal mentality, to be discarded: it has no place in the 21st century state. This is despite the fact that in the Comoros the formal political process, and the state, has largely failed: custom is ideally placed to supplant it. This project will explore the reasons why Comorians do not formally sanction customary political systems: why there are never serious suggestions that custom be invoked, despite all the evidence that it functions efficiently? We will probe the largely artificial separation of politics from cultural practice, and the underlying logics of the opposition between “tradition” and “modernity” as viewed in the Comoros. We will consider whether a rejection of custom in favour of an inefficient European system is a product of Comorian perspectives on the world that see Comorian culture as tradition, and inferior to European culture, qua modernity, and we will draw upon the concept of mimesis to problematise the post-colonial encounter. We will question Comorian perspectives on life, and, developing Bourdieu’s concept of illusio, and the idea of the cleft habitus, we explore whether and how Comorians envisage customary practices as offering them a better future.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants