A HOLLOW CROWN

In much of sub-Saharan Africa, “kings” (or “traditional leaders”) have made a spectacular comeback (Perrot and Fauvelle-Aymar Reference Perrot and Fauvelle-Aymar2003; Perrot Reference Perrot2009). Constitutional reforms in Ghana and Uganda in the 1990s made room for “traditional authorities” (Englebert Reference Englebert2002: 345), with Ghana going so far as to make their appointment independent of the state (Ray Reference Ray1996: 183). The South African ANC increasingly relies on “chieftains” to control rural areas (Van Kessel and Oomen Reference Van Kessel and Oomen1997), while chiefs in Nigeria are demanding reforms to enshrine their role in the constitution (Vaughan Reference Vaughan2000). Political decentralization and pressure on natural resources have turned “local chiefs” into key players in Burkina Faso and Niger (Ouedraogo Reference Ouedraogo2006), and in 1995 the president of Mozambique called for the return of “traditional authorities,” although his own party had formerly abolished them (West and Kloeck-Jenson Reference West and Kloeck-Jenson1999: 457). The “born-again” Buganda kingdom in Uganda, dissolved in 1867 but reinstituted by the National Resistance Movement in 1993, draws large crowds to its ceremonies and celebrations, is staffed by highly educated urbanites, and is bankrolled by international corporations and Indian businessmen (Englebert Reference Englebert2002). “The continuing role and influence of traditional leaders,” writes Logan, “is now widely accepted as given” (Reference Logan2009: 102).Footnote ³

This development—or perhaps rather the growing outside interest that makes it visible in the literature—feeds into a general rhetoric of the “retreat” or even the “failure” of “the African state,” for which the blame is laid on civil strife, “endemic corruption,” or structural adjustment programs (Gaulme Reference Gaulme2011; see, for example, Reno Reference Reno1997; Reference Reno1998; for a critical review, see Di John Reference Di John2010). In this reading, chiefs are seen to “step in” to fill the resulting “power-vacuum.” Ray says that in Ghana they form a parallel power to the state (1996: 181), while Mbembe, with regards to traditional chiefs and other non-state actors, speaks of a “quasi-constitutional doubling up of power” (1999: 106). In some cases, “traditional authorities” have even been elevated to the status of “civil society,” as international organizations attempt to work with them rather than with state officials who are deemed corrupt, inefficient, or both (Perrot Reference Perrot2009).

This argument needs to be nuanced, however, both with regards to the “retreat of the state” and the assumption that “traditional authorities” are simply waiting to fill the gap. The “retreat of the state” narrative has been questioned partly on historical grounds: “An initial objection to the ‘state collapse’ thesis is that its terminology is misleading, since it gives the impression that once-integral states are now falling apart, whereas states in Africa have never approached a Weberian ideal, nor even resembled European approximations to that intellectual construct” (Tull Reference Tull2003: 430). Others question the narrative's basis in empirical evidence: we are witnessing not the retreat or collapse of the state, writes Hibou (Reference Hibou1998), but rather its privatization. State functions are “discharged” (Hibou Reference Hibou1999, borrowing a term from Weber's analysis of feudalism) to private or quasi-private institutions, while the boundaries between the private and the public are increasingly blurred. States are being restructured in new ways, in response to internal pressure, shortages of external funding, private management of resource extraction and violence, and globalization, but they are not disappearing.Footnote ⁴ Read from this perspective, the “return of the kings” participates in a broader renegotiation of governance and takes place not against but within the state: “traditional leaders” are but one group among others—warlords, successful businessmen, politicians-cum-NGO leaders, black market dealers, private resource extractors, transnational organizations—that jostle for power on all levels. Thus they do not appear to be an alternative to, but rather part of a new form of state politics based on a “hybridization” of political institutions (Logan Reference Logan2009: 104).

This, however, assumes rather a lot about the nature, ambitions, and homogeneity of “traditional authorities.” Most of the examples cited above deal with societies that had identifiable precolonial political hierarchies and centralized states (pace Skalník Reference Skalník1983: 26), or where colonial powers were successful in establishing “traditional leaders” (Geschiere Reference Geschiere1993: 151). Northern Chad provides a counterexample: although it has long evolved in the margins of centralized states (Kanem-Bornu to the southwest, Waddaï to the south-east, and the Ottomans to the north) it has no history of centralized political institutions, and colonial and postcolonial attempts to establish a “traditional leadership” have consistently failed. Yet the 2012 investiture of the derdé, “paramount chief” of the Tibesti, was celebrated with great pomp and drew a large audience from among the regional population, but also Chadian state officials and international dignitaries. This even though everyone locally knows the derdé is powerless and that the current candidate was probably chosen for his relative incapacity. In such a context, the question is not one—inherently normative even in the broadest sense—of the modalities of power or governance, or the relative share or hybridization of state and “traditional” authorities within it, but rather why these celebrations should happen at all.

Similar issues emerge when we take the state as our starting point. Chad never experienced a postcolonial golden age of state efficiency (as described in general terms by Young Reference Young2004: 24), but has been “collapsing” and “failing” from the outset. Resilience rather than failure or privatization therefore seems to be a key to analysis. This resilience lies partly in different notions of what states are for. Although the state in contemporary Chad is seen to do many things, most conspicuously distributing cash to avert rebellion, “governing” rarely seems to be one of them. This is particularly true in the north of the country whence came the last three presidents (all of whom came to power through coups d’état) and a large part of its armed forces, but which has never accepted anything but token state rule. The image of verticality and encompassment that Ferguson and Gupta (Reference Ferguson and Gupta2002: 982) identify as central to state ideology is thus reversed. That is, most of northern Chad, and in particular the Tibesti, is not encompassed by the state, but instead the state is encompassed, or rather restructured, from its (geographical) margins, which nonetheless remain beyond state reach (see Das and Poole Reference Das and Poole2004; also Leopold Reference Leopold2005).

This marginality entails a different kind of centrality. As Roitman notes regarding the centers of trans-border smuggling in northern Cameroon, “while etching out spaces on the margins, these sites are not marginal,” since they remain closely connected to the urban-based merchant and political elite (Reference Roitman2007: 190). Nor are the activities that they stand for marginal to local economies (see also MacGaffey Reference MacGaffey1991). “The demise of local agro-industry, the public sector, and private enterprise, combined with the insidious effects of structural adjustment programs, have made the economic strategies of unemployed and dispossessed people models of expansive techniques in a time of material contraction” (Roitman Reference Roitman2003: 229).

Indeed, the growth of trans-border commerce has in many cases led to a closer integration of geographically marginal areas with centers of political power and wealth through the construction of infrastructure for trade, and since profits made in border areas are rarely invested locally (Bennafla Reference Bennafla1999: 43, 39). Yet the centers these apparently marginal areas refer to are not necessarily those of state power. As a result, “The real map of the continent is about to reshape itself along regional and trans-regional axes of exchange and trade that to a large extent both match and transcend historical itineraries and zones of […] mercantile expansion” (Mbembe Reference Mbembe1999: 113).Footnote ⁵

Pace Roitman (Reference Roitman and Comaroff2006: 264), “governance” might not be the best way to capture these new (or renewed) forms of centrality. Across the continent, the development of what Banégas and Warnier (Reference Banégas and Warnier2001: 8) call a “moral economy of cunning and resourcefulness” has led to the emergence of “new figures of success,” including, alongside international football stars and multimillionaires, transnational smugglers, con-men, and rebels. These figures stand for wealth and success, but only incidentally attempt to control others in other than ad-hoc fashions. Key in many cases seems to be wealth rather than political power, and although much has been written on the connection between wealth and power in sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Bayart Reference Bayart1989; Warnier Reference Warnier2007) one cannot be made to systematically stand for the other. In northern Chad, although wealth and especially its spectacular redistribution are at the heart of local ambitions, wealth is not necessarily used to constitute lasting networks of patronage or political hierarchies, or to contribute to the kind of “embodiment” of power that Warnier (Reference Warnier2007) describes for the Cameroon Grassfields. Instead, distribution is a one-off event that derives its brilliance from the apparent absence of long-term calculation. The aim seems to be to create glory rather than lasting power and most participants evince little interest in “governance”—the attempt to effectively control others over the long term. Thus, although it might shed light on similar developments elsewhere, the derdé investiture participates in neither the “return of the kings” nor the privatization of the state. Rather, it stands as a symbol of a longstanding refusal to be governed, coupled with an equally enduring ability to accommodate, on the surface, all kinds of different demands and dignitaries, particularly if they know how to throw a party.

THE 2012 INVESTITURE CEREMONY

In the last week of January 2012, the small settlement of Zouar in the eastern Tibesti mountains (see figure 2) was teeming with cars, from Chad, Libya, and to a lesser degree Niger. This was unusual, since the busy trans-Saharan route that connects Chad to Fazzān in southern Libya avoids the steep mountain passes that block the access to Zouar and instead runs through a dusty plain 30 kilometers further east. Therefore, few people have any reason to visit Zouar's few administrative buildings, which are unfinished or largely abandoned, its five score mud brick dwellings, or the former French military fort that has proved surprisingly resilient to the passage of time—all of these far too scattered through the valley to form what one would describe as a village. Now, however, people were coming and going in the vast spaces between the few houses, looking for friends and cousins, allies and rivals. Soldiers were parading in open four-wheel-drives that had bundles of rockets stuck to their sides. The few market stalls were for once thriving. At the center of this activity was the house of the derdé-to-be, who was squatting on the floor in his dusty courtyard, surrounded by the prefect, sub-prefect, members of parliament, military officers, and customary chiefs. Visiting the derdé meant also, perhaps primarily, paying one's respect to the powers that be.

Figure 2. Map of northern Chad and neighboring countries (J. Brachet, 2014).

Most people, however, did not bother walking into Zouar. They stayed in the vast camp set up for the occasion twenty minutes walk away, where the more fortunate guests were put up in large shared tents made out of mats, segregated by sex, and marked out according to their socio-economic status. The more important the temporary resident, the bigger was the tent, the fewer people had to share it, the more food was brought in, and the more impressive was the arsenal of guns displayed outside. Guests of lesser standing had to find their own place to sleep. Younger Teda who had driven down from Libya in their four-wheel-drives in a few hours put up modern cloth tents close to the camp, while teenage pastoralists from Chad, who had often walked for days to attend the proceedings, slept in the open air curled up in their habitual blanket against the biting January cold. There were about a thousand guests in all, from small settlements in remote valleys in the Tibesti, southern Libyan cities, northern Chadian towns, or the capital city of N'Djamena. They included government ministers and traders, pastoralists and soldiers who were mostly very young, boys and girls, a few elderly men, and many women.

On the day of the ceremony, 29 January 2012—the party itself had already gone on for several days by then—everybody dressed up at their most beautiful. Those who could flocked to the local “landing strip”—a flat piece of ground 4 kilometers from the village and surrounded by acacias—to welcome the official delegation flown in for the occasion from N'Djamena on two French and one Chadian military transport planes.Footnote ⁶ About a hundred official guests arrived in this way, most of them Chadian, including the Ministers of the Interior and of Culture and other high-ranking civil servants. Among the foreigners invited for the occasion were several members of the French embassy and the French military detachment, the U.S. ambassador and his wife, and the EU representative in Chad. Also there was Monique Brandily, a French ethnomusicologist who had witnessed the two previous investiture ceremonies, in 1979 and 1996 (see Brandily Reference Brandily1981; Reference Brandily1996). International attention to this celebration of the “Teda community” and of the central figure supposed to hold them together, at least symbolically, was clearly of some importance, at least to the organizers.

Because the derdé is officially a civil servant of the Chadian state, the ceremony could not start without the Minister of Civil Service. He finally arrived on a separate plane as the sun was already high in the sky. By then, many of those who had spent hours waiting had given up, thirsty, tired, and disappointed. It was time for prayer, so they would not watch the ceremony after all and outspokenly criticized this lack of organization and, more obliquely, the allegiance paid to the state and its representatives despite the “traditional” nature of the ceremony.

The delegation from N'Djamena was ushered to chairs in the shade of a small purpose-built shelter, facing an empty pad of soil guarded by armed soldiers, 2 or 3 kilometers west of Zouar. The derdé was carried in on a chair and set down next to his newlywed (third) wife on a small mound of sand covered with a carpet at the foot of a big acacia tree. Palm leaves were brought in and then a short whip made of wood and leather with which the derdé beat the air around him. In the meantime, the crowd of spectators had overpowered the many police officers and soldiers and drawn close. People were jostling to get a good view, the youngest among them trying to get as close as possible without being hit or pushed back. The aim of the game was to touch the derdé, never mind where, or else to be photographed next to him. It was impossible to see anything from the official seats and people were gesticulating wildly as they attempted to catch a glimpse of or even film these moments, said to be at the heart of the ceremony. Meanwhile, the Minister of Civil Service had launched into a speech in French reminding those—few—who cared to listen that the derdé was an employee of the Chadian state. Elaborately dressed camels were ridden straight through the crowd and praise-singers began playing their drums, well aware that their singing was drowned out by the general turmoil. Women pushed forward to pay their respects to the derdé's second wife in her tent, while others started to pack up and leave, since there was no sign of the orderly singing and dancing promised in the official program. Especially younger women and girls had eagerly looked forward to this occasion to display their finery.

It is difficult to ascertain how much of the ceremony was “traditional” in any sense. The few documents describing earlier investiture ceremonies are mostly based on second-hand sources. The Austrian ethnologist Andreas Kronenberg, for instance, did not witness the ceremony before producing an account (Reference Kronenberg1955), which, apart from colonial sources, remains the earliest we have. Monique Brandily noted that the most important parts of the ceremony happened very quickly and were difficult to observe (Reference Brandily1996: 15). She then clearly reproduces a local summary of what ought to have happened. From the local point of view, if all spectators participate actively then few have a vision of the ceremony as a whole. Most do not know exactly what they are meant to do, what each scene means, or even what exactly is supposed to happen. In any case, there is no general agreement about these things and many quite simply do not care, although others, mostly urbanites, eagerly offer their own, often widely divergent interpretations.

The official delegation from N'Djamena was taken back to the local health center where they were served a lunch of the kind declared suitable for international visitors and sourced in N'Djamena. Now was the time for Francophone Teda dignitaries who reside in the capital to have serious discussions and exchange business cards with foreign diplomats in order to obtain a meeting or to plead for assistance with a local development project, a village, or an association. The planes took off for N'Djamena at around 4:00 p.m. In the camp young Libyan Teda were printing photographs taken on digital cameras or mobile phones during the ceremony on a little printer plugged into a generator (Zouar has no electricity), much to their local cousins’ amazement. In most of these photographs it was impossible to see the derdé (see figure 3). That evening the young women and praise-singers (aza) took turns singing, illuminated by small electric torches and blinding headlights. For many, this was what the ceremony really was about: an occasion to party, to show off, to flirt. The aza made up for lost time and sang until late at night, to the greater glory of everybody generous enough to remunerate their efforts. Far from there, the derdé was squatting on the ground talking to an old lady. People who happened to walk past greeted him simply, clearly much more interested in the party than the old man.

Figure 3. The derdé during the investiture ceremony (photo by J. Brachet).

THE INSTITUTION OF THE DERDÉ

The origins and even the exact nature of the office of derdé are shrouded in obscurity. There are no written sources that go back further than the late nineteenth century. Secondary sources, mostly based on oral material, are few and far between, and despite their small number they tend to disagree with each other. Throughout, the office is associated with the Tomagra family, among whom the derdé is still chosen today. The Tomagra are said to have migrated to the Tibesti from Kanem in the sixteenth century, and Kronenberg (Reference Kronenberg1955: 40) claims that they brought the institution with them along with Islam, an explanation that is plausible given the long Islamic state tradition that exists in Kanem.Footnote ⁷ On the other hand Jean Chapelle, military officer and author of the only full-length monograph on the Tubu of northern Chad (Reference Chapelle1957), cites local legends to the effect that on arrival in the Tibesti the Tomagra acquired the turban—sign of command—by ruse from the local derdé who preexisted their arrival, and then kept it “through diplomacy and force” (ibid.: 83). Other legends describe the first derdé as a Muslim stranger who the locals invited to stay, marry locally, and adjudicate in their disputes. Explanations of the historical origins of the office are as numerous as the informants questioned, and nobody, writes Chapelle (ibid.: 85), is sure who the first derdé really was. None of the lists of successive derdé that are available today fully agree, which in no way diminishes their prestige in the eyes of those who hold them.Footnote ⁸

There are several reasons why there might be so much disagreement. Firstly, although the position is now represented as unique, there probably used to be several derdés, in charge of different families or different parts of the Tibesti. Such sharing of the office would more closely correspond to the centrifugal tendencies of Teda social organization. Gustav Nachtigal, who in 1879 provided the first eyewitness account of the derdé and the Tibesti more generally, claimed that until very recently there had been two derdés in the northern Tibesti alone, one from each ruling family, Tomagra and Gounda. Only when the Gounda migrated in large numbers to the Kanem around the mid-nineteenth century did the derdé come to be exclusively appointed among the Tomagra, while the Gounda retained a right to certain material compensations otherwise reserved for the derdé. Similarly, the Arna, who lived on the southern slopes of the Tibesti, had their own independent derdé (Reference Nachtigal1879: 442). This is confirmed by a document published in French translation in 1956, but whose Arabic original purports to date back to 1889, consisting in an agreement between Tomagra and Arna to appoint a derdé for both, in addition to the ones the families already had (Arbaumont Reference Arbaumont1956).Footnote ⁹ What emerges, then, is not an image of one centralized power, but rather one of different arbiters (in Arabic, the term hākim is used throughout) vying for influence and resources.

However many derdé there might have been, all historical sources agree that they had little power. According to Nachtigal, used to Prussian splendor, the derdé he met in 1870 was powerless, greedy, decrepit, and poor:

The derdé's blatant poverty made him entirely dependent on the goodwill of his “subjects,” and as Nachtigal met him he was in Bardaï seeking gifts on the occasion of the date harvest. His position otherwise mainly entailed presiding at the (ill-defined) assembly of nobles, where his opinion was easily ignored, and at times acting as an arbiter, but only if people appealed to him on their own account (ibid.: 441). Ultimate appeal was made not to the derdé, but to either the assembly or the Sanūsiyya at Wāw in the Fazzān (ibid.: 442).Footnote ¹¹

Since little authority seems to have attached to the office as such, only outstanding personalities could turn it into something more meaningful. Those derdé who are still remembered, Nachtigal (ibid.: 440) notes, owe this distinction to their personal qualities, an example being Tafertemi's immediate predecessor Tahorké, who is credited with introducing various customary rules and a fixed-rate diyah. These exceptional derdé could shape the office as suited them and this might account for some of the disagreement among historians; this is not so much an invented tradition as one that, not only in representation but in fact, was highly malleable and therefore is difficult to trace retrospectively (see Guyer Reference Guyer1996). The best example of this is the derdé Chaï Bogarmi, appointed in 1890, whose forty-nine years of office spanned precolonial, Ottoman, and French times. He managed to “establish personal power of a kind that until then had been unknown among the Tubu” by using outside powers: the Sanūsiyya, whom he visited several times even before they moved their headquarters to southern Libya and then northern Chad; the Ottomans, whom he permitted to construct garrisons in Zouar and Bardaï; and finally the French (Chapelle Reference Chapelle1957: 93; see also Triaud Reference Triaud1995: 947). “It is strange to see a kind of savage, subtle and crafty, established at the meeting point of four converging and opposing powers—the Sanūsiyya, France, Turkey, Italy—competing in sharpness and acumen with them, perceiving their aims and their respective power accurately enough to deceive them all and to never really serve any of them, adapting to one situation after another while always making the most of it and, more generally, brilliantly playing a game of great political intelligence” (Reference Chapelle1957: 96–97).

The Ottomans offered Chaï a monthly salary and auxiliary troops and authorized him to imprison, fine, and even whip offenders. They also granted him the right to levy the zakāh on agricultural products, “a fact that had no precedent in the Tibesti” (ibid.: 93, see also Kronenberg Reference Kronenberg1955), although we will never know how much success he had at this. Yet even then his power was limited because the Ottomans took care to appoint his longstanding rival, Guetti, as their representative in the southern Tibesti (ibid.).

In 1920 Chaï submitted to the French, mostly in order to play off the French administration of the A.O.F. at Bilma against that of the A.E.F. in Faya, who supported Guetti.Footnote ¹² All illusions that the French military officers might have had about the derdé's influence soon faded. While in 1919 he was still described as “ferociously hostile” to the French,Footnote ¹³ the French colonial sources quickly agreed that he was merely a symbolic figure with no real power, among a people that had always refused all attempts at institutionalized political leadership. “The derdé's authority has nothing in common with that of a indigenous chief among the Blacks, or even among the Tuareg,” observed the chef de bataillon Rottier in 1929, adding, “His prescriptions are in no way orders of immediate execution, but only recommendations.”Footnote ¹⁴ He was, as the French commanding officer put it a year later, “hardly obeyed in the radius of his own hut.”Footnote ¹⁵ By 1957, a political report described the derdé in an utterly derogatory tone and concluded that he was “of purely ethnographic interest.”Footnote ¹⁶ The French seem to have kept him in office mainly because he was cheap—by 1949, he was paid less than a goumier (auxiliary guard)Footnote ¹⁷—and got some people to pay taxes sometimes. Moreover, they were keen to invent traditions, perhaps because otherwise there was so little else that seemed recognizable to them among the Teda. This keenness was immediately picked up and manipulated by the derdés themselves.

After independence, the status of “customary chiefs” in Chad changed little. Most were maintained in office and continued to play an important role in taxation, as the colonial head tax was replaced by a “civic tax” that functioned along much the same lines.Footnote ¹⁸ The various rebellions that shook Chad from the mid-1960s replaced a number of colonial chiefs (while others joined them), but overall, by dismantling the state, or rather by preventing it from developing, they strengthened local positions of power, whether “traditional” or not. As northern Chad came under rebel or Libyan rule in the 1970s the number of customary chiefs doubled or even tripled. The “official” incumbent often fled to N'Djamena to look after his “subjects” and to petition the president from close quarters, while others went over to Libya, and still others appointed themselves to take up the now-vacant office locally. The latter position was especially lucrative if it involved the distribution of foreign aid.Footnote ¹⁹ The derdé Oueddeï went into exile in Libya in 1966, where he stayed until 1975 and drew a stipend from the Libyan government until 1972.Footnote ²⁰ He died in Chad in 1977. His successor Kinimi Adoum Sidi also spent 1982 to 1987 “in exile,” and a replacement, Ali Tchenemi, acted in his stead from 1985 from his base in northern Kanem.Footnote ²¹

CHOOSING THE DERDÉ: LOCAL NEGOTIATIONS AND PRESIDENTIAL FIAT

Kinimi Adoum Sidi was reinstated in 1987 and died in 1995. He was replaced by Maï Barkaïmi, who held the office until his death in October 2009, more than two years before the investiture of the current post-holder. These two years were taken up by at times passionate negotiations. After the prescribed period of mourning, two candidates from two different branches of the Tomagra family put themselves forward. Erzé Barkaïmi, a former Frolinat (Front de Libération Nationale; see Buijtenhuijs Reference Buijtenhuijs1978; Reference Buijtenhuijs1987) fighter of venerable age, appeared to be the legitimate candidate according to the rule of rotation among three branches of the family consigned in the colonial and ethnographic literature. Yet a young colonel of the regular army based in Bardaï who belonged to a different branch put himself forward as an alternative candidate, on the grounds that Erzé was too old and incapable of managing contemporary problems. Further, it was widely known that the colonel was rich enough to be incorruptible. He had earned his wealth through involvement in illegal trans-border trade, or so people said, and was thus independent from N'Djamena. Faced with this opposition, Teda “elders” intervened to achieve reconciliation. They included the chefs de canton de Zouar, Wour, and Bardaï, the governor of the Tibesti, and local “wise men.” Even Goukouni Oueddeï, son of derdé Oueddeï and a former leader of the Frolinat and Chadian president (1979–1982), was flown in from France for the occasion. Although the colonel managed to buy some outside support, “custom” was upheld and Erzé was designated the only possible candidate. The colonel and his family refused to accept this decision and brought the whole matter before the Minister of the Interior, whose attempts at mediation failed. The colonel then used his army connections to approach Chadian President Idriss Déby and asked to be nominated directly. Déby refused, but decided to intervene in order to accelerate the “traditional” procedure that he considered too slow and inefficient at a time when the Tibesti was in great need of a “ruler.”Footnote ²² He called all the Teda “notables,” as he chose to define them, to a meeting in N'Djamena on 22 November 2010 (International Crisis Group 2011a: 6). After this meeting Erzé Barkaïmi was officially announced as the new derdé.

“Custom” is a slippery and inherently malleable term. In 1995, for instance, the successor was chosen according to “regional usages and customs and traditional norms of succession.” Yet these turned out to be a casting of lots among the five candidates who had been put forward, all five vetted by an “assembly of wise men,” and there was no sign of any “rule of rotation.”Footnote ²³ Similarly, when the derdé Chaï died in 1939 French military officers originally favored Oueddeï Kichedemi, whom they had already mentioned in 1935 as the likely successor, although “custom” of the kind put forward in 2012 would have disqualified him.Footnote ²⁴ Because several Teda expressed discontent with this choice, the French momentarily questioned their own preference: “It appeared to the chef de subdivision that it was in his interest to have by his side a derdé whose authority was recognized. He examined the Zouar archives … and in particular a well-documented study by the captain Schneider based on, it seems, information given by the derdé Chaï, the only repository of tradition in the Tibesti.”Footnote ²⁵

“Tradition” was thus largely decided by Chaï, whose political astuteness, as we have seen, was legendary. The French then came up with a different candidate, but at an assembly convoked at Bardaï in July of the same year he found no support whatsoever. The French therefore reverted to their original choice, although during the investiture ceremony Oueddeï was nearly killed by partisans of the rival candidate.Footnote ²⁶ Throughout the process we find little indication that anybody local really cared about the “custom” invoked by the French, and grievances against Oueddeï rather mention his rapacity and bias.

This malleability of “tradition” is quite normal. As John Comaroff writes, “The very concept of an ascriptive political system would appear to be contradictory. For, if the devolution and incumbency of authority, or access to power, were entirely a function of non-negotiable ascription, the system would not admit political action as this term is generally understood today. […] The transmission of office … is determined by factors extrinsic to the stated prescriptions; and the meaning of these rules is an empirical problem sui generis, to be resolved after, and not before, the fact” (Reference Comaroff1978: 17, 2, his emphases).

It is this rather arbitrary attention to “custom” in the justification of the choice of the current derdé that needs to be explained, then, as well as the extrinsic factors that made it happen the way it did. Let us start with the latter. On one level, the involvement of the central government was unsurprising. As a 1970 presidential decree states, in Chad all customary chiefs above the level of village are appointed and revoked directly through presidential decree. As “auxiliaries of the administration” answerable to the prefect, their primary functions are to control public meetings and markets, help with the census, and survey natural calamities and dangerous animals.Footnote ²⁷ While the 1993 constitution, which was drafted under close international supervision, only mentions customary chiefs in passing, as “guarantors of custom,”Footnote ²⁸ a 2008 presidential decree states that “traditional chiefdoms” are the smallest administrative unit of the Republic of Chad and that they are constituted “based on traditional and customary authority,” but at the same time “created, modified, and abolished by decree.”Footnote ²⁹ This close dependency of contemporary “traditional chiefdoms” on postcolonial states is common throughout Africa, although particular political arrangements vary from case to case depending on the structure of the state involved, the nature of political institutions co-opted, and the impact of colonial rule (Geschiere Reference Geschiere1993; Ouedraogo Reference Ouedraogo2006).

Yet that the unlucky candidate to the derdé-ship managed to contact the president directly and expected him to intercede in his favor tells us something more about the Chadian state. Contemporary Chad is largely governed through presidential decrees with little to no power accorded an ever-changing government and parliament. Déby's de facto direct control over “customary chiefdoms” seems to be first and foremost a way of bypassing intermediate administrative structures, and is mirrored by direct presidential control over most local structures that matter, “traditional” and not. As a result, a particular chief's authority depends primarily on his personal relationship with the president (Néné Tassi Reference Néné Tassi2000: 13) and appointments are understood as sinecures. Conversely, Déby attempts to harness “traditional authority” to further his own. For example, in early 2006, as he weathered rebellions, coups, and elections, the president, usually fond of presenting himself as a simple “camel-herd's son,” added “Itno” to his name, with reference to his grandfather, Zaghawa sultan of the Dar Bilia in colonial times (see also Marchal Reference Marchal2006: 149). In December 2010, he appointed himself to his grandfather's former throne, replacing his half-brother Timan, whom he judged to be too powerful. Déby, playing to all audiences, is thus both a “democratically elected president” and a “super-sultan.”Footnote ³⁰ This seems to confirm Hibou's analysis of an internal “restructuring” of African states that blurs the boundaries between public and private, “modern” and “traditional” (Reference Hibou1998; Reference Hibou1999).

That said, central state involvement is only part of the answer. From 1997 to 2002, the Tibesti was the site of an armed rebellion led by Youssouf Togoïmi, Déby's former Minister of Defense. Teda have been heavily involved in many of the subsequent rebellions that have shaken Déby's government, and there is no doubt that were Déby to affirm state control in the Tibesti then rebellion might flare up again at any time.Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, it is an open secret that the Tibesti is home to a flourishing trans-border trade with Libya and beyond. It is thus a region where fortunes can be made quickly and where local power brokers have the means, firepower, and potential allies to resist excessive “meddling,” as, in his own way, the colonel proposed to do. Chadian state control of the Tibesti is thus based on a delicate balance between state sponsorship of local dignitaries, judicious laissez-faire, and short-lived public affirmations of military might, as in autumn 2012 when Déby suddenly replaced all senior military officers in the area, accusing them of involvement in illegal trade and corruption. The newly built hospital in Bardaï in northern Tibesti stands as a reminder of this. Vast and shiny, it has been left empty, with no doctors or even nurses, because the money allocated to equipment and salaries simply disappeared, without raising eyebrows on either the local or the national levels. Spending funds in the Tibesti without asking what happens to them afterwards is one way to buy peace in the region. Indeed, “politics” in northern Chad, as represented on the national news, seems to be but an endless round of doling out of wads of cash to those who matter, while people gossip endlessly about the unimaginable sums of money sunk into the current fragile peace.

Similarly, that the derdé was ultimately chosen in N'Djamena does not necessarily indicate the influence of the central government, but rather that of Teda resident in the capital and in exile abroad. Chad is remarkable among Sahelian states in that while Saharan populations tend to be marginalized elsewhere, most famously in Mali, here they are generally understood to “run the country” (Buijtenhuijs Reference Buijtenhuijs2001; Magrin Reference Magrin2002; Debos Reference Debos2013: 97). A few had been ousted with the demise of Chad's former president Hissène Habré, a Dazagade from Faya (and thus also a “Tubu” in the broader sense of the term), but “Tubu” and Teda continue to occupy central government posts and key positions in the national administration and army, and also provide a disproportional percentage of rebel leaders.Footnote ³² On the day of ceremony, the respect paid by the guests who had arrived in Zouar by car, truck, or on foot to those who came by plane underlined the importance of the N'Djamena Teda as much as that of the official delegation and international guests. It was also powerful symbolically: not everybody, sultan or not, can mobilize two national armies, French and Chadian, and borrow three military transport planes to cover the more than a thousand kilometers between Zouar and the capital. To make this happen, people in influential places had to decide that it should, and their influence was thus felt throughout whether they were physically present or not.

Neither was the large number of foreign participants in the ceremony innocuous. The French army provided infrastructural support as a matter of course. French soldiers, masters of the Chadian airspace backed up by a permanent base in Faya, were strutting up and down all over Zouar and feeling quite at home. Several high ranking foreign diplomats had chosen to assist the investiture of what is, after all, but a minor customary chief in a remote and sparsely populated area of a poor country with little international visibility. From an international perspective, northern Chad is the last area of the Sahara still considered relatively “secure” and as somehow immune to Islamist involvement, whatever that might actually mean on the ground. This, and its proximity to southern Libya, makes northern Chad a desirable military base and training ground from which to combat “trafficking,” human and otherwise, and “international terrorism.” The Chadian government is France's first ally in the region and the Chadian army has proved a valuable and much-courted partner in the 2013 war in northern Mali. But the French are not the only foreign influence interested in this part of the world, as witnessed by the EU representative and especially the U.S. ambassador's presence. However, despite Déby's keenness to establish international partnerships, his actual hold on the Tibesti is limited. International players wanting to benefit from the Tibesti's newfound “centrality” in contemporary Saharan developments are thus faced with the difficult decision of whom to address. (Not the derdé, as it turned out, since he carefully kept, or was kept, away from the international delegation.)

These multiple interests and influences contributed, perhaps not so much to choosing a particular derdé as to making sure that nobody of any real political significance would occupy the post. The candidate chosen at the end was very old, partly disabled, overwhelmed by his new responsibilities, and consequently probably open to outside influences of all kinds. Moreover, participants in the ceremony speculated unashamedly about his proximate demise, and in a way his appointment postponed rather than resolved the problem of succession. The maintenance of “custom,” with all its inbuilt uncertainty, thus allowed for political negotiation on all levels and made sure the choice at the end would be inoffensive to all.

THE LIBYAN CONNECTION

Chadian political tussles were only part of this picture. The most remarkable feature of the 2012 investiture ceremony was the highly visible presence of Libyan Teda. They were everywhere, particularly young men, with flash cars, “modern” urban outfits (jeans and shirts, or brand-new jallābiyyas clearly bought for the occasion), sun-glasses, expensive mobile phones, and digital cameras with which they photographed everything and everybody. They ignored local political negotiations and barely acknowledged the existence of the Chadian state—border controls have collapsed with the 2011 war—while thoroughly enjoying the folkloristic aspects of the occasion, the beautifully dressed camels and girls, and all other ostentatious presentations of “Tubu culture.” Many had never set foot in Zouar before, or only once or twice during their childhood, but they were filled with pride at the proceedings and wanted to immortalize and take away with them as much of it as they could. Their Libyan ways jarred with local notions of sociality and they tended to stay in groups speaking Arabic, but this in no way diminished their pleasure at being there. They also felt much at ease with the Euro-Americans there, especially those among them who knew some English. “Welcome to Libya!” one of them smilingly announced, with his arms stretched out to encompass the whole Tibesti, before noticing his error, laughing. Far from marginal to them, the Tibesti is the heart of “Tubu-land” and an integral and “authentic” part of Libya as they imagine it.

With the Libyan war in 2011, Libyan Teda have gained in confidence in terms of both claiming an independent identity and political autonomy. Some Teda joined the uprising against Qadhafi as early as the spring of 2011 and in exchange for their services they have obtained what they interpret as total control of the Libyan south and its borders. Many in private express a rather ambivalent attitude toward Qadhafi's regime, well aware that there are no guarantees that any future Libyan government will treat them better than its predecessor. Publicly, though, they described the post-Qadhafi era as an occasion to claim back their “rights” to southern Libya, of which they have been deprived by Qadhafi-backed regional Arab tribes. This optimism has led to the creation of not only various Teda militias, but also a nation-wide “conference” of Teda and several cultural associations whose aim it is to further Teda language and culture.Footnote ³³ These are run by well-educated Libyan Teda, speak primarily to Libyan and international audiences, and voice notions of history, identity, and culture that make little sense to most inhabitants of northern Chad but fit neatly with similar “identity movements” in North Africa.Footnote ³⁴

Although in contemporary Libya most claims to political preeminence are negotiated at gunpoint, questions of “culture” and history are crucial to local notions of legitimacy. The 2011 conflict and its aftermath have brought a strong return to local identities, exacerbated by the absence of a centralized state and the state's lack of legitimacy (Lacher Reference Lacher2011: 142). Most of Libya is still run by local military councils with the help of “notables,” and several towns have expelled residents of outside origin and confiscated their property (International Crisis Group 2011b: 28). Often such local xenophobia has racist undertones and many of the victims are of darker skin color than locals.Footnote ³⁵ Similar logics are at work in the Libyan south: a few weeks after the derdé's 2012 investiture ceremony, fighting broke out in Kufra between Arabs and Teda, followed by analogous fighting in Sabha later that year.Footnote ³⁶ From the Arab viewpoint, the “Tibbū” are “African”—a perspective unwittingly echoed even in more cautious media reports—and therefore have no right to be there.Footnote ³⁷

This idea is not shared by most Libyan Teda, who consider themselves the original inhabitants of Libya's extreme south and now wish to translate this claim into political preeminence. Paradoxically, this means that the younger generation, at least, understood their presence at the derdé's investiture ceremony, although it took place in Chad, as a way to not only show their economic and military superiority but also prove their historical legitimacy with regards to southern Libya: thus the casual redefinition of the Tibesti mountains as Libya. In conversation, the derdé was described as a Teda king of great antiquity and reputation, intimately connected to the settlements of the Libyan south. Young Libyan Teda intellectuals eagerly claimed that written documents about the derdé could certainly be found in Kufra, or even in Arabic manuscripts kept in Egypt. In any case, there were no doubt some historical traces somewhere that would prove their history to be as venerable as that of their Arab neighbors and give them prior rights to the Libyan south. “It is all written down, one just has to find where,” two university-educated youth explained in polished classical Arabic, “There can be no doubt that we are the Garamantes [the inhabitants of the Fazzān in Roman times].” Chad, and the difficult relationship the country maintains with Libya, were simply bracketed out, as is, in a sense, the local background of the derdé himself: the historical and cultural emphasis on his position in no way implies that young Libyan Teda would ever feel bound by the political directives of someone who remained, in their eyes, an uneducated old man.

This de-localized renegotiation of local identity is possible because, despite the current emphasis on local identity, few notions could be worse suited to capturing the complex tissue of networks and alliances that inform the Libyan south. The Arab tribes that now dispute the “ownership” of the southern oases conquered them in the mid-eighteenth century from their original Teda inhabitants (Rohlfs Reference Rohlfs1881: 290). At that time these oases acted as trading posts rather than places of permanent settlement and functioned as part of a socio-economic system within which notions of local origin made little sense. Many of the Arabs who now claim priority in Sabha and Kufra have family also in northern or central Chad, who migrated there in the mid-nineteenth or early twentieth centuries as refugees from the Ottoman and Italian conquests.Footnote ³⁸ Reluctant to leave Chad, they were called back by Qadhafi in the 1980s and settled, many for the first time, in the Libyan south. More often than not they left behind wives, children, in-laws, and property, and this in turn allowed them to seek shelter in Chad during the 2011 war. Their claims to “local identity” or even historical precedence in southern Libya are thus as tenuous as those put forward by their Teda neighbors; while continuing close connections between northern Chad and southern Libya exemplify the renewed visibility, observable more widely on the continent (Mbembe Reference Mbembe1999: 113), of longstanding historical regions based on exchange rather than (national) political control.

Conversely, a large number of Chadian Teda migrated to Libya with Qadhafi's rise to power in 1969 and particularly with the discovery of oil and concomitant development projects in the Libyan south (Clanet Reference Clanet1981). Many only returned to Chad for sporadic visits. Libya played an important part in the Chadian civil war and for some time parts of the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti were occupied by Libyan armed forces (Buijtenhuijs Reference Buijtenhuijs1987). In order to bolster his claim to the disputed Aozou strip Qadhafi distributed Libyan identity papers to all northern Chadians who wanted them, only to several years later deny their validity and that of identity papers owned by Libyan Teda.Footnote ³⁹ This makes it difficult to distinguish between “Chadian” and “Libyan” Teda, a distinction that in any case makes little sense locally, where almost everyone has spent at least some part of their life in the other country. This fluidity further exacerbates conflict, not least because it means that Teda and Arabs are equally well placed to benefit from the many transnational business opportunities the border region offers.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

These business opportunities have changed socio-economic conditions on both sides of the border. Real money, the kind of money that makes girls giggle with admiration and gives rise to stories that will still be remembered years later, was not brought by the Libyans, despite their classy outfits and digital cameras. Rather, it was raised locally and spent ostentatiously in bouts of excessive generosity. The camp set up for guests at the investiture ceremony was, by local standards, lavishly equipped. The huts contained carpets, hangings, and heavy Libyan blankets, one of the central prestige objects in every Teda bride's trousseau and a great comfort on cold Saharan nights. There was far more perfume, skin-cream, oil, incense, and henna than the women could possibly use. Nobody really bothered washing up dishes, since there were always new ones to hand. Vast quantities of fizzy drinks replaced the usual murky well water and their empty cans piled up next to the derdé's tree. Food almost uniquely consisted of sweets, imported chocolates, and meat, in strong contrast to the usual boiled flour or Libyan pasta. Thirty-five camels had been killed to honor the derdé, more than ever before, it was claimed. The place where they had been slaughtered near the campsite was drenched with blood, and everyone's belly was bloated with fresh boiled intestines and meat washed down with unlimited helpings of extremely sweet tea.

Other tokens of wealth were less equally distributed. Girls and young women had come carefully dressed in new veils or jilbābs worn for the first time. Libyan women especially shone, through excessive use of lightening creams and heavy and expensive makeup and scent. Golden jewelry dangled on slender wrists, representing sums that every female present could calculate in her head within seconds and that were counted in hundreds of thousands of francs (or hundreds of dinars). The ubiquitous mobile phones had been replaced for the occasion with vastly more expensive (and in Chad, illegal) satellite phones, for family calls and to be played with ostentatiously. Most of these good things were simply left behind at the end of the party to be taken by those who wanted them—why bother washing a veil or blanket when there are so many to be had? Half a day later the camp had been stripped bare and only a few anemic youths scavenged the now-empty huts for remains of tea sets. The derdé, who was nominally credited with everything given at this occasion, was extremely wealthy, and this wealth was intimately tied up with his prestige, but it only lasted a short while. Everything he received for his investiture had to be distributed, leaving him, despite his new government salary, as poor as he had been before: an old man on the floor of his half-finished house, now blessed with the burden of an additional wife.

The few researchers who have studied the Tubu have described ceremonies of giving as the only way in which Tubu society, otherwise portrayed as bereft of political institutions, is held together (see especially Baroin Reference Baroin1985). The derdé investiture ceremony seems to back up this argument, but only to a point. It is true that the ceremony was only possible because the derdé could draw on generous contributions from all of his family and that everything he had collected he had to give away at the end.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is also true that this lavish display of goods and giving was the element of the ceremony that seems to have impressed itself most on people's minds, or at least was most talked about after. Yet there appears to have been no notion locally that acts of giving were constitutive of a coherent whole, or that by giving, the derdé or anybody else involved created lasting social ties. There was no rhetoric of having to be “thankful for the gifts that we all received,” or that the derdé had accrued “power” through his generosity, but rather one of disappointment that the excess had not been more excessive, coupled with a real spirit of competition about who managed to take away the most, ideally by stealth.

Most importantly, what was most admired was gratuitous giving or even ostentatious destruction. One of the derdé's brothers-in-law had offered him a fleet of “Toyota V8 toutes options,” the most expensive model around and still rare in Chad. The next day the derdé's younger brother rammed one of them into a rock. No attempt was made to repair it; the derdé's brother-in-law simply gave him another one, one price bracket up. More generally at the heart of the local fun were flagrantly risky driving and open destruction of four-wheel-drives, the most widely recognized markers of wealth and status as well as a central means of production. Nights were spent in endless “rodeos.”

A similar argument can be made with regards to money handed over to the aza, traditional praise singers of the blacksmith cast, who were one of the investiture ceremony's main attractions.Footnote ⁴¹ Giving to aza (singular eze) is part of any large Teda celebration and wedding videos tirelessly reiterate the act, with all spotlights on the giver. It “works” precisely because aza are considered incapable of holding on to anything: “notorious drunkards and wasters,” they will just lose the money “in one night”; giving to them is like “throwing money into the wind.” Like the derdé, then, the aza may become incredibly rich in one day and lose it all the next—a wealthy eze is an aberration, and a grateful one a myth. In sum, giving is seen to be at its most prestigious and most memorable when it leads to nothing but instantaneous and short-lived glory, and this, rather than any “traditional authority” or “social structure,” seems to be what held together most of the Teda who were concerned with these events.

This time, however, there was more to this. It was not only that the aza were given almost exclusively 10,000 francs CFA notes (the highest denomination), but also that people placed “packets” instead of individual banknotes on the aza's foreheads, 100,000 or even a million francs at a time. Men and women who had carefully prepared bundles of new 1,000 or even 5,000 franc notes found no occasion to use them and so, with resigned shrugs, put them back into their pockets or handbags (bought for the occasion). Some people attributed this situation to a more general inflation of the gifts given at all kinds of celebrations, including weddings. More immediately relevant, as people said proudly, were the incredible sums gained recently by people engaged in illegal trans-border trade of a new kind, mostly involving drugs, but also guns.Footnote ⁴²

One of the derdé's brothers-in-law, in particular, is famous for his role in local trafficking. He himself does not smuggle, people claim, but he runs a kind of shop and service station stocked with Libyan goods and especially petrol that sells to everyone who passes through with reason to move quickly and undetected. His camp near Zouar is called “new Dubai” because with the money he earns he has made it look “just like Dubai.” He made a much-celebrated apparition at the ceremony at night, “driving a chocolate-colored V8, dressed in a chocolate-colored jallābiyya, with chocolate-colored trousers and a chocolate-colored turban, chocolate-colored boots and a chocolate-colored pistol in a chocolate-colored holster—nobody had ever seen anything like it!”Footnote ⁴³ He had also given all of his female relatives new veils and dresses, and satellite phones and phone cards. People whispered that he was the real reason so many people had turned up, not just Teda but also Dazagada from Faya, since he is from a family that can be counted as both. This family connection gave the derdé's second wife particular standing during the ceremony, and as the women saw it, she rather than her husband was responsible for the bounty distributed and it was she and her fairytale brother, rather than her ageing husband, who really mattered.

Everybody was clearly aware that giving, once pushed to such excesses, becomes exclusive, limited to a select few, and destructive of more accessible patterns of exchange. Yet this inspired admiration rather than criticism, perhaps because everybody knew that it might well not last. The colonel, ousted from the official selection process and electing with his family not to attend the ceremony, had in a way come in through the back door. As much as the Chadian central government and Teda dignitaries residing in the capital tried to control the proceedings, the show was stolen by a different kind of hero: the swaggering cash-dispensing smuggler.

This seems to be an example of Banégas and Warnier's (Reference Banégas and Warnier2001) “new models of success and power” in post-structural-adjustment sub-Saharan Africa, as functionaries, university graduates, and politicians make room in the popular imagination for fraudsters, bandits, and football stars. In northern Chad this is by no means a new development. There, military heroes, rebels, and “war lords” have long ousted more sedate political figures from the pantheon of men to emulate, while glory has “forever” been linked to the momentary ability to give wildly and without calculation. Rich people in the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti are either a short-lived phenomenon or else they carefully invest elsewhere. Political loyalty is similarly unstable since social values emphasize autonomy and opportunism. Some of this is certainly due to the recent history of the country where, in Marielle Debos' phrase, “The very conception of time is linked to experiences of war and to the permanent reproduction of the conditions that led to war” (Reference Debos2011: 426). But much of it simply seems to be a matter of taste and a pronounced social preference for brief spectacular glory and improvisation over institutionalization and “tradition,” and over stable political control and governance.