Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa

Abstract

Current usages of the terms patrimonial and neopatrimonial in the context of Africa are conceptually problematical and amount to a serious misreading of Weber. His use of the term patrimonial delineated a legitimate type of authority, not a type of regime, and included notions of reciprocity and voluntary compliance between rulers and the ruled. Those reciprocities enabled subjects to check the actions of rulers, which most analyses of (neo)patrimonialism overlook. We apply these insights to a case study of Botswana and suggest that scholars reconsider the application of Weber’s concepts to African states.

Full text

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Rethinking Patrimonialism and
Neopatrimonialism in Africa
Anne Pitcher, Mary H. Moran, and Michael Johnston
Abstract: Current usages of the terms patrimonial and neopatrimonial in the context
of Africa are conceptually problematical and amount to a serious misreading of
Weber. His use of the term patrimonial delineated a legitimate type of authority, not
a type of regime, and included notions of reciprocity and voluntary compliance
between rulers and the ruled. Those reciprocities enabled subjects to check the
actions of rulers, which most analyses of (neo)patrimonialism overlook. We apply
these insights to a case study of Botswana and suggest that scholars reconsider the
application of Weber’s concepts to African states.
Introduction
Is “neopatrimonialism” a pathology, analogy, cause, effect—or a term for
all of Africa’s troubles? How is it linked to Weber’s notion of patrimonial
authority, and what parts of it, precisely, are “neo”? Is it an attribute of most
African states only, or are its causes and consequences generalizable to
other countries and regions of the world? Indeed, given its myriad uses by
scholars, does the term neopatrimonialism retain any analytical utility at all?
We argue that the answer to that last question is “yes”—but that the mean-
ing and its implications can be surprising.
African Studies Review, Volume 52, Number 1 (April 2009), pp. 125–56
Anne Pitcher is a professor of political science at Colgate University and has studied
politics in southern Africa for more than twenty years. She is currently complet-
ing a manuscript that examines the interaction of party politics and economic
reform in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa.
Mary H. Moran is a professor of anthropology and Africana and Latin American
Studies and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Colgate
University. Her most recent book is Liberia: The Violence of Democracy (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Michael Johnston is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Colgate
University. His most recent book is Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and
Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which was the winner of the 2009
Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

126 African Studies Review
We begin with a survey of the uses and misuses of neopatrimonialism
as an idea, and of the analytical and policy consequences that may flow
from its abuse. We then return to Weber to explore the core concept of
patrimonial authority. Our focus—like Weber’s over a century ago—is on
the contrasting ways rulers may establish legitimate authority by securing
consent (compliance) from their subjects. Throughout the analysis we
draw a distinction between types of authority and types of regime—the lat-
ter referring to the means by which positions of power are filled in a state
and the degree to which citizens are allowed to participate in that process.
Larry Diamond’s classification (2002), extending from liberal democracies
to politically closed authoritarian regimes, embodies well our understand-
ing of regime types. We suggest that many applications of neopatrimonial-
ism wrongly assume a direct causal connection between types of authority
and types of regime, or even treat the two as synonymous. To illustrate the
fundamental difference between the two, and to illustrate the critical role
of human agency in shaping both, we examine the case of Botswana, where
a modern democratic state has been erected on historical foundations of
patrimonial authority. We conclude by exploring some implications of our
analysis, arguing that a misreading of Weber has turned African countries
into examples of an imagined common pathology and caused a mistaken
identification of this pathology with a type of legitimacy or authority. As
deGrassi (2008) has noted, too often the term neopatrimonialism is invoked
in the absence of detailed historical and ethnographic attention to particu-
lar times and places. Scholars consequently ignore variations in the inter-
actions of power and accountability within African states that might lend
themselves to insightful comparisons with countries elsewhere.
Diverse Roots of Legitimacy
For Weber, patrimonialism was not a synonym for corruption, “bad gover-
nance,” violence, tribalism, or a weak state. It was instead a specific form
of authority and source of legitimacy. Weber (1947[1922]) defined power
(Macht) as “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will
be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of
the basis on which this probability rests” (152).1 While he understood such
power as pervading all human interactions, he was fascinated with how cer-
tain structural positions were allocated the right to expect compliance by
others—or “the probability that a command with a given specific content
will be obeyed by a given group of persons” (1947[1922]:152). Almost all
structural subordinates retain some power to resist or subvert the desires of
those in authority, but they also agree that certain individuals are entitled
to their obedience. Weber’s ideal types, describing the cultural variations
with which this compliance with authority could be constructed, attempted
to examine how the dominated understand, participate in, and even cel-
ebrate their domination. Going well beyond Marx’s ideas of mystification

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 127
or false consciousness, Weber tried to catalog the diverse ways in which the
legitimate exercise of power could be culturally framed.
In patrimonial societies, which have existed in many places outside
Africa, what we would call the state was indeed the personal domain of
one or a few leaders. But in many such places significant legitimacy was de-
rived from an aspect of patrimonialism that is now frequently overlooked.
These were reciprocities that helped cement patrimonial authority. Such
reciprocities—personal, densely interwoven, often lopsided, and based on
intangible and symbolic dynamics of status, loyalty, and deference as much
as on material exchange—became the means by which rulers sought obedi-
ence from the ruled. Even if those reciprocities did not rest upon contem-
porary distinctions between the public and the private, or employ formal
mechanisms of accountability and transparency, where they were sustained
through voluntary compliance they constituted a system of legitimate au-
thority.
The issue is important on several levels. Often both analysts and perpe-
trators of various abuses of power tell us that such practices are simply reas-
sertions in new settings of historic, distinctively African forms of power and
leadership. That interpretation of the neo part of the term oversimplifies
both patrimonialism and the cultural manifestations that grew up around
it. Further, such arguments conceal rather than explain the ways everyday
Africans have adapted to the nation-state and international systems. They
underestimate the diversity of historical situations across the continent
as well as the responses to them. They ignore the impact of change, and
they blind us to the rationality that may exist within the responses to that
change. Such arguments not only condemn those societies for failing to live
up to idealized visions of life in developed states and markets—visions rare-
ly, if ever, realized anywhere—but also imply that something fundamental
in African society prevents them from ever doing so. They ignore the fact
that even in the most highly industrialized societies significant elements
of patrimonialism survive and thrive today without decisively undermining
democratic processes or economic development.2
To understand the patrimonial core along with the neo prefix, we must
reexamine Weber’s use of the concept. A true neopatrimonialism, we ar-
gue, would have to include the reciprocities that Weber discusses along
with the personal dimensions of power, governance, and compliance that
feature in most contemporary accounts. It would have to recognize the mu-
tual, socially constructed obligations he delineated, along with the inequali-
ties. It must allow for the possibility that such a complex, multistranded set
of ties and obligations is too complex and diverse to predetermine any one
regime type, dysfunctional or otherwise. State frameworks, after all, have
proven remarkably adaptable to a wide range of social settings and styles of
interaction, as any look at South, Southeast, and East Asia will show. Finally,
a fair reexamination of Weber must avoid the evolutionism that later theo-
rists have read into his typologies. Neither patrimonialism nor neopatrimo-

128 African Studies Review
nialism is an inevitable stage in some linear progression; to imply that they
are effectively relegates many societies to “backwardness,” or at the least to
a “developmentally delayed” status. Although Weber was interested in tran-
sitional moments when one form of legitimacy gives way to another, he was
remarkably careful, for his time, to distinguish between local historical pro-
cesses and claims for universal trajectories. As Roth has argued, “Weber’s
comparative approach was directed against theories of historical sameness
as well as theories of universal stages” (1978:xxxviii).3
Rituals and Metaphors in the Construction of Authority
Jean-Francois Vincent, a French anthropologist, described in 1986 a tradi-
tional ritual practiced by the Mofu of Northern Cameroon to confer legiti-
macy on an incoming chief. A panther was hunted and killed, transported
to the village chief, and eventually eaten. Because the panther was the most
powerful and feared of forest animals, the transfer of this power made the
chief’s subjects tremble before him, confirming his political legitimacy. The
chief needed neither prisons nor gendarmes to enforce his will; rather, the
transfer to him of the panther’s magical power was sufficient to establish
compliance with his commands. Yet in return for that power a chief was
obliged to feed his subjects and protect them from sorcery. Otherwise, he
risked rejection.
Vincent wrote that the Mofu extended this understanding of political
authority, and the use of animal imagery that described it, to other power-
ful figures in Cameroon, including the president of the republic. Many Af-
rican leaders since independence have also understood the persuasive pow-
er of such rituals or other traditions, and many have twisted their historic
meanings to establish their contemporary political legitimacy. Consider, for
example, Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko, that archetypal “big man,” who ruled
the former Zaire. Even after decades in power, he continued to justify his
dominance with the following traditionalist appeal:
“Nowhere in this continent have there been two chiefs in one village, a
majority chief and an opposition chief. Dating back to ancestral times,
there has been only one chief. In the United States and Europe, it is com-
monly accepted that enlightenment emanates from the clash of ideas. In
Africa, we follow an ancestral policy in which, when a problem arises, we
rally around the leader and work out a solution. Zaire is a shining example
of this policy in action. For this reason, we have become the most stable
country in Africa.” (Quoted in Elliot & Dymally 1990:21)
Here Mobutu stressed that not only did a politically closed authoritar-
ian regime (to use Diamond’s terminology) have historical roots in Africa,
but also that solidarity and unity of the people around their leader was an
enduring feature of African politics.

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 129
Numerous rulers have appealed to traditions that associated chiefs with
panthers or national leaders with leopards (and related visual represen-
tations), or have cited ancestral policies that precluded competition and
enforced solidarity in order to build their legitimacy. Michael Schatzberg
observes that political images depicting leaders such as Félix Houphouet-
Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire or Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya as “Father of the Na-
tion,” and portraying those over whom they ruled as their “children,” were
common across Middle Africa. In Mobutu’s Zaire, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya,
Cameroon, and to a lesser extent in Senegal and Tanzania, paternal met-
aphors were particularly potent because, as Schatzberg notes, “there are
two sides to this particular coin. On the first side there is the loving, kind,
understanding, always solicitous, and caring paternal—and occasionally
maternal—figure…. The second side of the coin is less loving, less nurtur-
ing and less paternal. If the father smiles and forgives, the chief snarls and
punishes” (2001:24–25).
As Schatzberg argues so persuasively, such repertoires of myth and met-
aphor, imagery and rhetoric constituted the “moral matrix” on which Af-
rica’s leaders based their legitimacy because they resonated so well with the
cultural understandings of local populations (2001:23–31). However, the
reliance by leaders such as Houphouet-Boigny or Paul Biya of Cameroon
on particular historical moments or potent symbols to justify their author-
ity was selective, varying in accordance with their perceptions of threats
to their authority. Over time, each leader oversimplified “traditional” re-
lationships between chiefs and subjects to rationalize his own behavior. At
different moments during his rule, each privileged the importance of par-
ticular customs or rituals, and their symbolic meanings, over others. Thus a
newly installed leader, unsure of his political base, might reference a feared
animal to induce compliance. Another leader, as his rule continued, might
portray himself as the “father of the nation” who would nourish and protect
his subjects if they offered him respect in return. Yet another, after many
years, might resort to “ancestral policy” to resist external pressures to seek
legitimacy through the ballot box. Scholarly claims regarding the ubiquity
of patrimonialism in Africa which have been based on such rhetoric, and
the practices that it attempted to justify have therefore to some extent over-
stated the case.
Patrimonial and Neopatrimonial Constructs in the Social Science
Literature
Particularly in the political science literature, the terms patrimonialism and
neopatrimonialism are commonly understood (with reference to Weber) to
denote systems in which political relationships are mediated through, and
maintained by, personal connections between leaders and subjects, or pa-
trons and clients. Authority and the social linkages through which it is ex-
ercised are vested almost as personal property in an individual, rather than

130 African Studies Review
in impersonal institutions or in a mandate conferred and withdrawn by
citizens. Ironically, while patrimonialism is said to cement social bonds in
small-scale situations through a reliance on trust, reciprocity, and material
exchanges, it is believed to distort power, corrupt authority, and fuel per-
sonal aggrandizement when it permeates larger political institutions such
as bureaucracies and states.
This mode of authority is often contrasted with rational-legal authority,
another of Weber’s ideal types, in which an impersonal bureaucratic logic
governed by law and reason is the defining characteristic of legitimate au-
thority. In other words, citizens comply because they believe the law grants
authority to the ruler. The law, or a governing instrument such as a consti-
tution, has a transhistorical rationality of its own that extends beyond the
behavior of any individual leader. In theory, the leader derives legitimate
authority to act and expect obedience only insofar as he or she is account-
able to the rule of law.
Thus the typical person in authority, the “superior,” is himself subject to
an impersonal order by orienting himself to it in his own dispositions and
commands (this is true not only for persons exercising legal authority who
are in the usual sense “officials,” but, for instance, for the elected president
of a state) . ... It is held that the members of the organization, insofar as
they obey a person in authority, do not owe this obedience to him as an
individual, but to the impersonal order.” (1978[1922]:263)
Weber noted, however, that this ideal is never fully achieved: “legal author-
ity is never purely legal. The belief in legality comes to be established and
habitual, and this means it is partly traditional” (1978[1922]:263).
Although the ideal of rational-legal authority hardly exists anywhere,
scholars still invoke the ideal type to highlight what they see as shortcom-
ings inherent in African states. Furthermore, many social scientists add the
modifier neo to patrimonialism to distinguish what they regard as a modern
variant of Weber’s ideal type—one in which a veneer of rational-legal au-
thority has been imposed by colonialism, yet a personalistic or “patrimo-
nial” logic characterized by patronage, clientelism, and corruption is said
to prevail—just as it is assumed to have done in the past.
First applied by Zolberg in 1966 to depict the traditional patterns of
authority exhibited by party states of West Africa (140–45), the term pat-
rimonialism or neopatrimonialism has persisted, even proliferated, in recent
decades.4 Initial works sought to explain patrimonialism or neopatrimo-
nialism as a consequence of the continued existence of premodern cultural
norms, or as an effect of colonialism. More recent studies find patrimonial-
ism or neopatrimonialism to be the cause of poor leadership, economic
stagnation, and a host of other ills. Frequently scholars simply employ the
term or closely related concepts (see Medard 1994) as handy labels to de-
scribe leaders, regimes, and systems.

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 131
The vastly different contexts and the variety of purposes to which the
concept has been applied have diminished its analytical utility. As illustra-
tions, we highlight four interrelated uses, variously depicting (1) a set of
social relations at either the community or nation-state level, mediated by
personal loyalty and governed by bonds of dependence and subordination;
(2) the rent-seeking behavior and personalist patterns of authority prac-
ticed by African leaders in selected country settings; (3) an economic logic
distinguished by the continual blurring of public service and private gain,
with serious implications for economic development; (4) a characteristic
regime type associated with most African countries not only during the pe-
riod of one-party rule, but also in the present period of democratization.
The works that we cite below are meant to be representative but not exhaus-
tive.
First, several scholars employ patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism to
describe a range of social relations in Africa. In a nuanced examination of
child soldiers in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars, for example, Wil-
liam Murphy (2003) adapts the concept of patrimonialism to explain the
institutionalization of youth clientelism in the service of violence. He ar-
gues that a patrimonial logic, similar to that governing the behavior of “big
men” in these former “shadow states,” also characterizes the administration
of rebel groups during wartime. Like political leaders, military “big men”
take advantage of the raw power of violence and control over resources to
dispense patronage to youth in return for loyalty, protection, administra-
tion, and firepower. This domination, established through terror, is shaped
into a form of authority through the creation of an administrative staff, and
these patron-client relations are replicated down through the command
structure and into the civilian populations over whom the rebel groups ex-
ercise control. The reciprocal relations of dependency thus created allow
the rebel groups to perpetuate themselves over time and space.
While Murphy uses the term to capture the ways in which a micro-level
relationship between a rebel commander and his troops is structured, oth-
ers use it to illustrate the predominance of personal relationships in the
governance of past and present African polities. They note that African
communities were “historically” organized along patron–client lines, a pat-
tern they now perceive in the contemporary political organization of states.
Medard (1982), for example, refers to the “traditional clientelist states”
of Rwanda and Burundi (166), arguing that patron–client relationships
formed the basis of the state from king down to peasant. Hyden also as-
serts that “historically speaking, this (personal rule) is a form of rule that
existed in all regions of the world” (1997:25) and that a “lineage orienta-
tion,” whereby patron–client relations, kinship networks, and other “pri-
mary reciprocities” govern communities, continues in Africa (2006:55).
The persistence of such community-centered networks, as Hyden sees it,
explains why informal rather than formal rules have greater salience, and
why rational-legal authority gains little traction in contemporary African

132 African Studies Review
settings. While other states have moved on to newer and more efficient
forms of governance, Africa remains rooted in a “community-centered ori-
entation” (Hyden 2006:56).
Precisely what has kept African states from moving on is often left un-
specified, although a common line of argument is that colonialism, while
severely disrupting traditional patterns of authority in some instances, also
reconstructed and reconfigured patron–clientelism so that it survived in
“neotraditional” form after independence. In some cases, it replaced tra-
ditional modes of maintaining authority that local communities regarded
as legitimate.5 The survival of clientelism, its reconfiguration in an era of
dependency and modernization, and its existence alongside a bureaucratic
logic thus give the contemporary state its neopatrimonial character. In these
states, social norms do not distinguish between public and private realms,
and they crowd out other forms of autonomous social organization. Efforts
to suppress such norms and values or to organize society along different
lines have largely failed: instead, “parochial identities” (Hyden 2006:62)
ethnic ties, and communitarianism prevail, and the growth of “civil society”
as an autonomous check on state power faces severe challenges.6
Such arguments locate the logic of patrimonialism in social relations
reflecting either precolonial traditions or the coercive, distortionary, and
exclusionary practices of colonial regimes. A second use of the term neopat-
rimonialism builds on that analysis but applies the term more deliberately to
describe the behaviors and patterns of authority established by particular
national leaders and their followers after independence. Examples of this
kind of analysis can be found in Callaghy’s work on Zaire (1984) and Nige-
ria (1986) as well as in Joseph (1987) on Nigeria, Ellis (1993) on Togo, and
Bayart (1985) and van de Walle (1994) on Cameroon.7 Reno (1995, 1998)
extended the label (though he applied it rather sparingly) to a set of ex-
treme cases in his work on the warlord states of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and
the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Vidal (2003, 2008) and Hodges
(2008) have recently applied the term to Angola. Indeed, at one time or an-
other scholars have labeled nearly every African government as patrimonial
or neopatrimonial.
In each case, scholars explore the dimensions of what they variously
call “personal rule” or “big man rule” in specific settings where autocratic
leaders retain power, accumulate wealth, and maintain order by relying
on patrimonial or neopatrimonial authority. Patrimonialism or neopatri-
monialism share a number of core features in these works: the flouting of
rational-legal authority in favor of highly personalistic presidential rule; a
reliance on patron–client ties and networks for professional and political
advancement or support; the use of state resources to reward supporters for
their loyalty; and repeated appropriation of state funds by African leaders
and their followers for their personal enrichment. In these cases, as Joseph
(1987) and others (e.g., Diamond 2008: 145–46) have pointed out, the
informal takes precedence over the formal and the private conquers the

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 133
public. Private strategies and particularistic mechanisms trump impersonal
rules and institutions as patrons and clients seek economic and political
rewards.
Noteworthy in these works is the variety of leaders and contexts to
which scholars apply the labels of patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism.
The cases range from a study of Houphouet-Boigny in Côte d’Ivoire (Zol-
berg 1966), a country hailed as a showcase of economic growth in the 1970s
and 1980s, to the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (Callaghy 1984), which
was considered a paradigmatic example of economic ruin during the same
period. They include warlords in Sierra Leone, military leaders in Nigeria,
and autocrats in Angola; their ideological persuasions range from the more
procapitalist approach of Houphouet-Boigny and Daniel Arap Moi of Ke-
nya, to the Afro-Stalinists turned petro-capitalists of Angola under Eduardo
dos Santos. In many such applications the distinction between types of au-
thority and types of regime is blurred, and what precisely neopatrimonial-
ism explains and how it does so are left unclear.
Despite early concerns that patrimonialism had become a “catch-all
concept” (Theobald 1982:555) and that the applicability of patrimonial-
ism and neopatrimonialism to such a range of cases required too much
conceptual stretching (Crook 1989), the third and fourth uses of these
terms attempt to advance more general theoretical propositions about the
causes and consequences of neopatrimonialism in developing countries.
In the third case, scholars trace relationships between patrimonialism or
neopatrimonialism and economic development. For example, Theobald
observes that a lack of development tends to produce a patrimonial public
administration. Drawing on Weber’s typology, he suggests that underdevel-
oped states typically have bureaucracies in which individuals rely on public
office to secure private gain because such states lack the institutional ar-
rangements necessary to provide a consistent source of revenue to the state.
Without a stable revenue stream with which to pay its officials, the state fails
to create a professional and credible bureaucratic apparatus; officials rely
on personal networks for power and funds, thereby creating patrimonial
bureaucracies. Although Theobald does not restrict his analysis to Africa,
he cites a number of examples from Africa to support his claims.
Like Theobald, Pierre Englebert (2000a) does not limit his explanation
to cases in Africa, but he does invert Theobald’s causal logic. He asserts that
neopatrimonialism or patrimonialism, rather than being the consequence
of a certain stage of economic development, themselves hinder develop-
ment and economic growth. Employing a rational-actor model, Englebert
locates the cause of neopatrimonialism in the imported nature of African
states at independence and seeks to differentiate cases according to this
criterion. He argues that where preexisting institutions were disrupted by
colonialism or simply did not exist prior to colonialism (as in Congo/Zaire,
for example), African leaders confronted a legitimacy deficit at indepen-
dence. Leaders such as Mobutu then compensated for their low or weak

134 African Studies Review
initial legitimacy by relying on neopatrimonial strategies. By securing the
“instrumental loyalty” of competing elites, such strategies yielded the great-
est short-term payoffs, but with the result that economic development was
derailed (2000b:7).
Englebert finds that in Botswana, by contrast, traditional Tswana elites
were able to “reappropriate” the state from the departing British, and thus
never lost their legitimate right to rule (2000b:112). Instead, the histori-
cal continuity of traditional patterns of loyalty and authority gave the inde-
pendent Botswana state a high level of legitimacy. Endowed with the “ini-
tial allegiance” of their subjects, Botswana’s leaders did not need to resort
to neopatrimonial strategies to consolidate power. As a result, they were
able to pursue longer-term developmental strategies: “The initial degree
of state legitimacy at independence,” he says, “is therefore a determinant
of the pressing nature of leaders’ quest for increased power and the rela-
tive returns, in terms of power, of developmental versus neopatrimonial
strategies” (2000b:116). Like Englebert, we highlight the case of Botswana
below—but we argue that neopatrimonial authority is compatible both with
high levels of legitimacy and with economic development.
Eric Budd (2004) and Jay Oelbaum (2002) reinforce the claims made
by Theobald and Englebert regarding the relationship between neopatri-
monialism and poor developmental outcomes. Like Theobald, Budd indi-
cates that patrimonialism is a structural feature of many states but is not
an institution; as he states, “patrimonialism mitigates institutionalization”
(2004:6). He claims that all states are patrimonial but “some states are clear-
ly more patrimonial than others” (2004:139), and he attempts to document
levels of patrimonialism exhibited by thirty developing countries. Budd em-
phasizes the inhibiting effect of patrimonialism not only on the economy
but also on democratization; his rankings indicate that the more patrimo-
nial the state is, the lower its gross national product and its “freedom” score
in the Freedom House rankings are likely to be. Although Budd does not
present an African case study to illustrate his claims, many African coun-
tries appear in his rankings, with Botswana considered a “moderately patri-
monial” state and Gabon, Kenya, Nigeria, Zaire, and Zimbabwe considered
“highly patrimonial.”
Oelbaum broadens the discussion to include the international finan-
cial institutions and other developing countries with which a postcolonial
state might interact. Examining Ghana under Jerry Rawlings, he argues that
neopatrimonial relations explain how neoliberal market reforms might be
accomplished in the face of a distinct lack of popular support. According
to his analysis, the international actors assume that “donor-supported pro-
grammes of economic liberalization undermine clientelism and require a
fundamental change in the way African leaders relate to and reward their
followers” (2002:286), yet many leaders seem able to capture these external
resources and allies in an infinitely flexible network of “personal” relation-
ships. Even the IMF and other paragons of bureaucratic rationality become

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 135
corrupted through contact with the “disease” of African patrimonialism.
The support of international financial institutions and middle-income
countries like Malaysia, combined with neopatrimonial structures, inhibits
the growth of a domestic capitalist class and the consolidation of democ-
racy in Ghana (2002:318). Unfortunately, the “challenge of distinguishing
cause and effect in Ghana’s economy is too recondite for most of Ghana’s
population” (2002:318), leaving them at the mercy of patrimonial leaders.
Scholars such as Budd and Englebert are mostly concerned to trace
the negative effects of neopatrimonial practices on economic development
while observing that such results are not “intrinsically African” (Englebert
200b:7). By contrast, scholars in our fourth category such as Bratton and
van de Walle (1994, 1997) see patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism as
institutionalized regime types that are mostly specific to African states. They
state categorically that “while neopatrimonial practices can be found in all
polities, it is the core feature of politics in Africa and in a small number of
other states, including Haiti, the Philippines, and Indonesia” (1994:459,
their emphasis). As with the case studies above, the central characteristic
of these systems is “personal relationships” that “constitute the foundation
and superstructure of political institutions. The interaction between the
‘big man’ and his extended retinue defines African politics, from the high-
est reaches of the presidential palace to the humblest village assembly”
(1994:459).
In making this sweeping claim, Bratton and van de Walle build on the
analysis of African politics by Medard and also by Jackson and Rosberg,
who make a case for the systemic existence of personal rule across much of
Africa.
Personal politics are “systems” insofar as they function to regulate power
in the state and thereby provide political goods or carry out political func-
tions (such as peace, order, stability, and non-material security), but they
are not systems of public governance or of rationalist decision-making. A
political system of personal rule is not a system which responds to public
demands and support by means of public policies and actions, nor is it
a system in which the ruler aims at policy goals and “steers” the govern-
mental apparatus by information “feedback” and “learning”. Indeed, the
concept of governance as an activity of guiding the ship of state toward a
specific destination—the assumption of modern rationalism and the pol-
icy sciences—fits poorly with much political experience in contemporary
Black African countries. (1982:18, italics in original).
With the exception of Ethiopia, however, Jackson and Rosberg largely
reject the label “patrimonialism” as a description of personal rule, argu-
ing that Weber’s ideal type presupposes “‘traditional’ norms that rulers
and subjects can use to justify or criticize government acts or omissions…”
(1982:74). They note that “traditional” norms may still exist at the local
level in Africa and perhaps in select cases such as Botswana, Lesotho, Swa-

136 African Studies Review
ziland, and Somalia, where existing territorial boundaries and institutions
were not disruptive. But because colonial boundaries were artificially im-
posed, the norms did not exist at the “territorial” level; therefore, in their
view, to describe African states as “patrimonial” would be of “questionable”
value (1982:74). As we will discuss below, Weber’s formulation does indeed
stress the reciprocity between leaders and followers in patrimonial systems.
In Jackson and Rosberg’s analysis, however, what might have been a positive
or functional institution in smaller-scale indigenous forms of governance
is assumed to be lost in cases where colonialism established novel political
boundaries, thereby unsettling traditions.
Bratton and van de Walle (1997) differ from Jackson and Rosberg in
two important respects. First, whereas the latter eschew the term patrimoni-
alism, Bratton and van de Walle, like Medard, embrace and extend it. They
refer to a “patrimonial logic” that operates within African politics to em-
phasize the commonality with Weber’s ideal type. Simultaneously, they label
political regimes as “neopatrimonial” rather than “patrimonial” in order
to acknowledge the contemporary and national, as opposed to local or re-
gional, character of this phenomenon. Moreover, they follow Medard in his
argument that “unlike the patrimonial regime the neopatrimonial regime
hides behind a façade which is complex and differentiated” (1982:181).
Second, although they acknowledge Jackson and Rosberg’s point that
personal rule undermines the kinds of formal institutions that seek imper-
sonal processes and ends (a claim also made by Budd), Bratton and van de
Walle argue that “when patrimonial logic is internalized in the formal insti-
tutions of neopatrimonial regimes, it provides essential operating codes for
politics that are valued, recurring, and reproduced over time” (1997:63).
Under the rubric of “neopatrimonialism” they subsume several “variants”
in Africa including personal dictatorships, military oligarchy, plebiscitary,
and competitive one-party systems (1994:468–89).8 Like Clapham (1985),
they claim that neopatrimonialism is not just a limited pattern but also a
systemic, institutionalized regime identified by “at least three—albeit infor-
mal—political institutions” including presidentialism, clientelism, and the
use of state resources to maintain legitimacy (1997:63–68).
Bratton and van de Walle wrote at a time when African countries were
undergoing complex processes of democratization and neoliberal reform.
It could be argued that the moment that they were describing has reced-
ed with the demise of the one-party state and the departure of “big men”
such as Mobutu Sese Seko, Houphouet-Boigny, and Daniel Arap Moi—all
of whom, according to scholars, practiced variations of neopatrimonialism.
Yet their 1994 article anticipates that neopatrimonialism likely would pro-
vide the “template” on which transition would take place (1994:489; see
also Chabal & Daloz 1999:4–16). For some scholars that has indeed proved
to be the case. Recent work on democracies as well as on market economies
in Africa continues to juxtapose implicit and explicit references to the in-
formal, personalistic, and patronage-based appeals characteristic of neopat-

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 137
rimonial regimes against the characteristics of formal institutions, such as
regular elections and the rule of law, that are said to be the foundations of
democratic ones. The use of binary opposites to characterize such regimes
persists: neopatrimonialism is synonymous with clientelism and prebends
(and in some accounts causes violence and instability), while the adoption
of democracy represents its antithesis.9
Recently, however, several of these scholars have begun to recognize
the limitations of the concept for explaining transitions to democracy, and
variations in politics and policy among democratic regimes. This has result-
ed in more judicious uses of the term and greater recognition of the pos-
sible coexistence of neopatrimonialism with formal democratic procedures
as well as the interpenetration of the two. Thus VonDoepp and Villalón
(2005), Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi (2005), van de Walle (2007),
and Erdmann and Engel (2007) now use the term sparingly. They also al-
low that most democracies are now hybrid or mixed polities combining
both formal and informal modes of authority, personalism, and rule of law.
Other scholars such as Bauer and Taylor (2005:8–11) and de Grassi (2008)
have begun to question the utility of the term altogether—as do we.
Erdmann and Engel (2007) both critique previous references to patri-
monialism and neopatrimonialism and offer a view of current practices of
domination or authority in Africa—one stressing equally the “legal-ratio-
nal bureaucratic aspect” and the patrimonial aspect. That approach, they
argue, corresponds more closely to the hybrid reality of African states to-
day and brings greater analytical rigor to the term neopatrimonialism (104).
They offer different means by which scholars might measure the existence
of the two types of domination (patrimonial and legal-rational authority)
that constitute the modern variant of neopatrimonial authority, as well as
a rather crude typology that distinguishes among regime types (which they
characterize as democratic, hybrid, or authoritarian), possible subtypes of
these regimes, and different forms of authority practiced by each regime—
either neopatrimonial or legal-rational authority (113). Erdmann and
Engel claim that their operationalization of neopatrimonialism not only
moves the debate beyond Weber, but also requires that the study of formal
institutions be balanced against the ways in which informal relationships
structure political and economic power in Africa.
Later in this article we address the question of whether acknowledging
both neopatrimonial and legal-rational authority offers an improvement
on previous efforts to draw a sharp distinction between the two. But first
we must compare these past and present uses of (neo)patrimonialism with
Weber’s conceptualization of the term. We ask whether elements of author-
ity said to constitute patrimonialism agree with Weber’s delineation, and
examine the types of societies to which he applied the term. Finally, we look
at the extent to which the evolutionist assumptions that underpin many
contemporary uses of the term compare with Weber’s own understanding.

138 African Studies Review
Misreading Weber
As we have seen, scholars of Africa seem to have been looking for a theory
of political relations in relatively small-scale polities, recognizing that post-
colonial nation-states tended to be more condensed than their European
counterparts. They were also seeking a way to account for a legitimacy that
was not institutionalized in formal bureaucratic structures of the state ap-
paratus, but seemed to have roots in kinship, precolonial polities, and other
forms of value. In addition, deGrassi suggests that scholars in the 1990s
needed a way to explain why liberal democracy did not flourish in all places
once the Soviet threat had been eliminated, as well as evidence concerning
the dangers of “statist” policies (2008:121). And, it appears, scholars of Afri-
ca were guided by unexamined evolutionist and exceptionalist assumptions
that African societies were differently located along a universal trajectory
from those of the West. Most important, as discussed above, contemporary
scholars of Africa have been at pains to explain how personalized relations
could function (or malfunction) in the public realm. Rather than question-
ing the supposed exclusion or neutralization of personal ties in rational-
legal bureaucracies, these analysts have seen such relationships as either
impossible to institutionalize (Budd 2004) or as “polluting” the public sec-
tor with inappropriate connections (Jackson & Rosberg 1982), resulting in
corrupt “hybrid” forms of social and political relations.
The very problem these scholars were trying to explain—why there is
no “fire wall” between the personal and the political in African nations—
was derived from a normative conviction that there should be a fire wall,
and from a sweeping empirical assumption that such boundaries are com-
monly found, intact and legitimate, in many or most other states. This in
turn was grounded in three problematic assumptions about rational-legal
bureaucracies: (1) they are intrinsically more advanced than historically
“earlier” forms of governance; (2) they are more suitable to large-scale ad-
ministration; and (3) they are the only bureaucratic forms compatible with
the broadest extension of democratic rights and market capitalism.10 The
result is that scholars have judged African societies by standards that have
not been realized anywhere.
At first glance, Weber seems to provide a convenient lens through which
to view twentieth- and twenty-first-century Africa, since he described patrimo-
nial legitimacy as an outgrowth of the organization of smaller scale entities
such as the family, pointed to its “mystical” or “traditional” symbolic construc-
tion, and understood it as historically preceding the rational-legal arrange-
ments of modern Europe. But a closer reading of Weber demonstrates that
his own understanding of patrimonial legitimacy was quite different from the
one that has been deployed by recent Africanist scholars, especially in terms
of the three issues mentioned above relating to scale, the symbolic construc-
tion of domination, compliance, and reciprocity, and the evolutionary rela-
tionship between different political and economic formations.

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 139
Guenther Roth opens his extensive introduction to a 1978 edition
of Weber that includes Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922) as well as other
writings with the following claim: “This work is the sum of Max Weber’s
scholarly vision of society. ... Economy and Society was the first strictly empiri-
cal comparison of social structure and normative order in world-historical
depth” (1978:xxxiii).11 Although the term patrimonialism (or “the patrimo-
nial estate”) is conventionally attributed to Weber, Roth notes that it was
actually introduced by an earlier writer, Carl Ludwig von Haller, as part
of an antiliberal attack on the separation of governmental authority from
divinely appointed rulers. Von Haller was dismayed by the very “deperson-
alization” of public life, which was later seen as the benchmark of European
political superiority. Roth notes that Weber rejected von Haller’s equation
of patriarchialism (the family-based domination of an individual man over
his wife and children) with patrimonialism, arguing that the latter was a
truly political and institutionalized system in which the ruler used as his
administrative staff members of his own household, including slaves, retain-
ers, and other followers.
Thus, where earlier German scholars had located the origin of extra-
familial administration in the family itself, Weber insisted on making a
qualitative distinction between purely personal household relations and
the structured interdependence of larger-scale units of governance. Argu-
ing that there were several possible ways to arrive at the latter sort of state,
he insisted that patrimonial domination, although not encoded in legal
rights, was grounded in “the subjects’ claim to reciprocity, and this claim
‘naturally’ acquires social recognition as custom” (1978[1922]:1010). Us-
ing current terminology, we might say that patrimonial legitimacy (or domi-
nation) is institutionalized and grounded in rules that are broadly shared
and understood but not, or not sufficiently, codified in law (see Helmke &
Levitsky 2004). We note, however that some African states are now formaliz-
ing these institutions; for example, the Ugandan government has restored
the traditional authority of the Buganda kingdom (see Englebert 2002),
while the Ghanaian government has formally recognized the jurisdiction of
customary authorities over land (see Lund 2008).
Weber noted that patrimonial legitimacy derives its force from the vol-
untary compliance of subjects with domination by their rulers, which is very
different from the domination deployed against slaves, and even from the
threat of joblessness used against free workers in industrial capitalist coun-
tries. Rather than forming an autocratic relationship, the parties to a patri-
monial arrangement, according to Weber, are highly aware of their mutual
dependence and have institutionalized means of holding each other ac-
countable: “The master is considerably influenced by the well-founded ap-
prehension that his own, especially his economic interests, would be badly
hurt by any shock to the traditional loyalty produced by groundless and ‘un-
just’ interference with the traditional distribution of duties and rights. Here
too, the master’s omnipotence toward the individual dependent is paral-

140 African Studies Review
leled by his powerlessness in the face of the group” (1978[1922]:1012).
This crucial point—that the collective requires the political authority to
exercise its powers responsibly—is frequently missing from contemporary
discussions of African patrimonialism, even though it is embodied in narra-
tives regarding the legitimacy of traditional authority such as the one told
by the Mofu. It is the very essence of how the “personal” and the “public”
seem to intersect and mutually constitute each other in many African con-
texts. Rather than positing this as a flaw to be overcome with increasingly
“rational” or “impersonal” institutions, Weber saw it as the strong yet flex-
ible bedrock of legitimacy institutionalized by this form of governance. In-
deed, the relationship of domination retains its legitimacy only insofar as
both sides recognize their responsibilities to each other.
Using the historical cases of ancient Egyptian, Roman, Chinese, and
Incan states to illustrate his arguments, Weber explained the feudalism of
medieval Europe as a transitional form in which the patrimonial relation-
ship between lords and fief-holders became codified and partially removed
from the domain of personal loyalty (1978[1922]:255–62). He traced the
bureaucratization of patrimonial relations in such great historical empires,
showing how the cultural symbolism of an individual, personal relation-
ship between the ruler and his governing officials could provide stability
and efficient administration in very large-scale systems. In the process he
also demonstrated, by implication at least, how bureaucratization could
grow out of patrimonialism rather than necessarily arising as a “rational”
negation of it. Indeed, as Roth points out in his introduction, understand-
ing how political legitimacy developed into numerous forms in the context
of differing economic and legal arrangements was at the heart of Weber’s
project of comparative analysis.
Weber’s primary project, after all, was an exhaustive sociology of the
legitimate forms of domination, which he saw as limited to patriarchal/pat-
rimonial, charismatic, and bureaucratic. According to this perspective, an
uprising against an authoritarian ruler might be a thrilling example of col-
lective agency, but like a coup d’etat it is a form of nonlegitimate domina-
tion (or power), assuming that the basic understanding of what constitutes
political authority is not in question. Both revolutionaries and juntas must
justify their usurpation by coming up with an effective system to suppress
the claims of the former holders of legitimate authority. There is, for We-
ber, no necessary connection between rational-legal legitimacy and democ-
racy, any more than there is a necessary contradiction between patrimonial
legitimacy and democracy. According to Roth, “If the course of history is
not predetermined but domination [is] inescapable at the same time that
its forms are limited, a historically saturated typology is the best analytic
tool for the researcher” (1978:c).
Some scholars, as noted above, have emphasized the inhibiting effect of
patrimonial authority on Africa’s economic development, and particularly
on the growth of market capitalism. There are good reasons to turn to We-

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 141
ber to support this linkage, since he states explicitly that the lack of predict-
able calculability (guaranteed by an established legal code) had a limiting
effect on the growth of markets and in some cases made the development
of capitalism impossible (1978[1922]:238). In the absence of codified rules
applicable across variable contexts, the economic incentives for capital ac-
cumulation and investment appear to be low. Callaghy notes, however, that
Weber’s antievolutionism leaves his theoretical model open to numerous
local articulations, and that to Weber patrimonialism is “‘compatible with
household and market economy, petty bourgeois and manorial agriculture,
absence and presence of capitalist economy’” (Weber 1978[1922], quoted
in Callaghy 1988:86]. Callaghy insists that
there is nothing mechanistic or deterministic about Weber’s views on state
and class formation or the development of capitalism. The same holds for
Africa today. The paths that different countries take are determined by the
presence and balance of facilitating factors, opportunities and struggles
between rulers, emerging classes, status groups, organizations and particu-
laristic forces, both internally and externally. (1988:89)
Weber’s model for the emergence of capitalism in conjunction with
rational-legal bureaucratic political legitimacy was, not surprisingly, the his-
tory of Western Europe, but he was imaginative enough to consider a mul-
titude of possibilities, including “patrimonial capitalism.” While he thought
it unlikely that this could reach the “true type of profit-making enterprise
with heavy investments in fixed capital and a rational organization of free
labor which is oriented to the market purchases of private consumers”
(1978[1922]:240), he mentioned some circumstances under which even
that could be achieved by a patrimonial regime. These conditions included
the following: “(1) the technical training should be available, (2) there must
be a sufficiently powerful incentive to embark on such a policy—usually
sharp competition.. . (3) a very special factor is necessary, namely, the par-
ticipation of urban communes as a financial support in the competition”
(1978[1922]:240). While Oelbaum (2002) seems to interpret the second of
Weber’s conditions as evidence that “Weber—not Charles Tilly as is typically
claimed—is the actual author of the theory that war-making and modern
state rationalization are two faces of the same coin” (291), the actual text
does not specify that the “competition” is necessarily military; the context
could suggest equally that the “sufficiently powerful incentive” is competi-
tion for trade and markets. As we shall see below, many of these conditions
are similar to the emergence of a vibrant and productive market economy
in postindependence Botswana.
In grounding his “historically saturated typology” in the examples of
Egypt, Rome, China, and the Inca of Peru, Weber was of course limited by
the kinds of material to which he had access, and he had very little access to
historical accounts of precolonial African polities, although as Roth points

142 African Studies Review
out, he used what he could find. It is therefore curious that latter-day schol-
ars would insist that precolonial Africa provides the best examples of both
traditional and “neo” patrimonialism.
In the course of “Africanizing” patrimonial legitimacy, much of the rec-
iprocity and mutual respect between ruler and subject that Weber empha-
sized seems to have been overlooked. For example, Goran Hyden claims
that for Weber, patrimonialism is
associated with the exercise of power in small-scale, face-to-face types of
traditional communities. In such patrimonial systems, a person rules due
to his personal power and prestige. Others are followers or subjects with
no rights and privileges other than those bestowed upon them by the ruler.
Authority is wholly personalized, shaped by the ruler’s own preferences
rather than a codified system of laws. The ruler ensures political stability
and personal political survival by providing security in an uncertain envi-
ronment and by selectively allocating favors and material benefits to loyal
followers who are not citizens but merely the ruler’s clients. (2000:18–19)
In addition to suggesting that patrimonialism is limited to small-scale soci-
eties, Hyden’s account of the relationship between ruler and subject lacks
Weber’s emphasis on legitimacy and accountability.
Furthermore, several accounts couple the reduction in scale and the
one-sided view of domination with an insistence that Africa is somehow the
home, par excellance, of patrimonialism. For example, Bratton and van de
Walle argue that
His [Weber’s] definition of patrimonialism may provide an accurate de-
scription of the political systems of small isolated communities with rudi-
mentary economies, including African chiefdoms in the precolonial era,
and the practices of patrimonialism may persist at the local level in a num-
ber of different settings.…It is clear that some nations in the developing
world, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa, retain in modified form many
of the characteristics of patrimonial rule. (1997:62)
This characterization of “precolonial African chiefdoms” is accompanied by
little ethnohistorical evidence to demonstrate that they were in fact “small,”
“isolated,” or had “rudimentary economies.” Any such claim that patrimo-
nial legitimacy is “traditional” across the continent must surely be qualified
by specifying where and when; Asante before 1900 but not after? Buganda in
the period of state consolidation or now?
Besides reducing the size of the society in which patrimonial govern-
ment may be effective (where Weber spoke of “grand continental empires”
these authors refer to “small, face-to-face communities”), some scholars in-
troduce a subtle, and in some cases evolutionary, time frame through the
use of terms like “persist” and “retain.” Some scholars (e.g., Bayart 1986)

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 143
attribute persistence to the conscious design of colonial officials to preserve
those elements of precolonial Africa that were most useful to them or, as we
have mentioned above, to the efforts of nationalist leaders after indepen-
dence to justify their legitimacy through reference to “tradition.” Clapham
makes the evolutionary argument most explicit in insisting that contempo-
rary patrimonialism exists in Africa because it “most corresponds to the nor-
mal forms of social organization in pre-colonial societies” (1985:49), but he
does not detail the causal mechanisms that contributed to its survival. Evolu-
tionist assumptions, moreover, are implicit in a number of current analyses
of the flaws of democratic performance in Africa. The implication is that
Africa has not kept pace and must now “catch up” with other countries. As
deGrassi notes, “An assumption that African patronage is an enduring as-
pect of rural systems.. . runs the risk of portraying rural poverty in Africa as
primordial, thereby occluding the processes through which African poverty
was historically produced “(2008:118).
Such evolutionary trajectories had no place in Weber’s carefully con-
structed historical typologies. Roth argues that Weber himself was the most
adamantly opposed to grand evolutionary schemas of any of the “classical”
social thinkers: “Weber rejected the prevalent evolutionary and mono-caus-
al theories, whether idealist or materialist, mechanistic or organicist; he
fought both the reductionism of social scientists and the surface approach
of historians, both the persistent search for hidden ‘deeper causes’ and the
ingrained aversion against historically transcendent concepts” (1978:xxxv).
Unlike the unilinear evolutionists of his day, Weber was a careful historian
of specific times and places; he was acutely aware of the dangers of general-
izing across unlike cases:
A genuinely critical comparison of the developmental stages of the ancient
polis and the medieval city... would be rewarding and useful—but only if
such a comparison does not chase after ‘analogies’ and ‘parallels’ in the
manner of the presently fashionable general schemes of development, in
other words, it should be concerned with the distinctiveness of each of the
two developments that were finally so different, and the purpose of the
comparison must be the causal explanation of the difference. (Agarrverhalt-
nisse in Altertum, cited in Roth 1978:xxxvii, emphasis in the original)
Furthermore, Weber recognized his ideal types as precisely what they were:
idealized concepts that would always differ in some respects from real social
relations and be shaped by local conditions:
Hence, the kind of terminology and classification set forth above has in no
sense the aim—indeed it could not have it—to be exhaustive or to confine
the whole of historical reality in a rigid scheme. Its usefulness is derived
from the fact that in a given case it is possible to distinguish what aspects of
a given organized group can legitimately be identified as falling under or
approximating one or another of these categories (1978[1922]:263–64)

144 African Studies Review
Returning to Weber’s original text is instructive in demonstrating what
has been lost, selected, and emphasized in the contemporary literature on
African patrimonialism. What Weber intended as a typology of forms of
legitimacy has been reinterpreted as a classification of regime types. The
discourse of recent years has naturalized the behavior not just of African
rulers but also of their subjects, portraying them as passive and accepting of
autocratic behavior in the name of “traditional expectations” (see Oelbaum
2002:293). Truly pathological leaders, like Charles Taylor of Liberia, have
been described as “neopatrimonial” as if their countrymen automatically
accept such claims to legitimate rule. In fact, as Englebert demonstrates
(2000b), such criminal and self-aggrandizing behaviors are more a sign of
the lack of legitimacy than a uniquely African style of leadership. As de-
Grassi (2008) argues, when ordinary people resist such illegitimate uses of
power, their actions should not be seen simply as a reaction to the diminish-
ing flow of patronage resources, but rather as a real attempt to hold lead-
ers accountable. A closer reading of Weber refocuses our attention on the
question of mutual rights and responsibilities, on the expectations for fair-
ness and assumptions of mutual dependence inherent in his construction,
and on the need for greater historical specificity than imagined African
villages. As Weber insisted, “it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis
of every authority and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey,
is a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent a prestige”
(1978[1922]:263, emphasis in the original).
If by patrimonialism we mean that rulers and subjects in particular
times and places understand that the customs and expectations governing
their relationships enable subordinates to hold leaders accountable in sig-
nificant ways, then informal institutions such as patron–client relations or
personal ties can complement and even reinforce formal institutions associ-
ated with democracy and rule of law while remaining distinct from them.
Our challenge as scholars is to question the assertion by some continental
rulers as well as scholars that “Africans like and expect strong, autocratic
leaders,” paying attention also to those instances in which popular dissent
rejects claims to “tradition”—as has occurred in numerous recent cases in
which leaders have been forced from office (see Schatzberg 2001). To ex-
amine these ideas, we turn now to the case of Botswana, ironically often
represented as the exception that proves the rule of neopatrimonial domi-
nation in Africa.
Botswana: Neopatrimonial, yet Democratic
Botswana’s rise from abysmal poverty to middle-income status, its sustained
multiparty politics, and its favorable scores on governance rankings make
it a key case for analysts of African development and democratization. That
exemplary status makes inferences risky: it is important to avoid both gener-
alizing from the unique, and—given the nation’s continuing difficulties—

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 145
accepting at face value the enthusiasms of aid and business interests hold-
ing a stake in the status quo. Worse yet is the risk of selectively linking ele-
ments of Botswana’s current situation to whatever we wish to emphasize in
its history. That would be to repeat the errors we have criticized in earlier
sections, whereby virtually any evil can be written off as (neo)patrimonial-
ism.
In fact, Botswana shows that a history of patrimonial authority neither
leads necessarily to a neopatrimonial regime, nor proves incompatible with
liberal democracy, as a reading of Erdman and Engel (2007) might suggest.
Instead, a succession of elites, deeply rooted in the traditional life of village
and countryside, used personal power and a range of reciprocities to solidify
their legitimacy as a governing class. In the process they built bridges across
tribal (morafe) divisions and solidified their own financial stakes in sound in-
stitutions. The result has been sustained economic growth and a successful
“open elite democracy” (Good 1992:95). Botswana’s elites have not aban-
doned patrimonialism or overcome it; rather, they have built a democratic
state on a foundation of traditional and highly personalized reciprocities
and loyalties. The leadership has been sufficiently secure, politically and
economically, to accommodate opposing parties and interests, as well as
the rise of a civil society that also brings traditional loyalties into the public
arena. Its electoral politics, while not as yet producing a handover from the
Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) to any of its rivals, has seen lower-level
victories by opposition parties; elections are widely regarded as fair and
substantially free of fraud.12
A variety of factors have contributed to Botswana’s development. The
land is dry but well-suited to the breeding and trading of cattle—a social
and economic enterprise critical to the rise of the elite, as we shall see. The
British left traditional institutions largely intact. The population is small—
only about 1.8 million—and concentrated in the eastern regions of the
Texas-sized state, and was thus relatively easily drawn into social networks.
Diamonds, the main natural resource, are not a resource curse (Acemoglu,
Johnson, & Robinson 2003): deposits lie deep beneath the surface (unlike
in the shallower fields of Angola and Sierra Leone), and mining is thus dif-
ficult and profitable only over the longer term. Those facts encourage part-
nerships between public and private sectors rather than smash-and-grab
extractive and political practices (The Economist 2004).13 The majority of
the population are Tswana speakers, but “ethnic homogeneity” should not
be overstated, either as a fact or as an explanation for development: eight
main tribes make up the Tswana nation.
Botswana has significant problems: the struggles of the Kalahari and
San peoples reflect a measure of ethnic tension. AIDS and HIV infection
rates are among the highest in the world, although recent progress, par-
ticularly among children, has been impressive (MSNBC 2008). Its political
style—close integration of the political leadership, relatively “short” hierar-
chies from grassroots to the state, continuity in government, cooptation of

146 African Studies Review
most minority groups, and tight control over symbols and networks under-
lying traditional legitimacy—has fostered stability and growth, but may also
resist challenges to the nation’s striking economic inequalities. While cor-
ruption has apparently been kept to moderate levels, significant scandals
requiring the formation of a national anticorruption Directorate did occur
in the 1990s. Botswana’s style of corruption, termed “elite cartels” in one
case study, may indirectly aid growth and reduce political uncertainties via
elite collusion. But elite networks that make for predictability today can be
barriers to needed adaptation tomorrow; other “elite cartel” cases suggest
that in a crisis—political (as in Italy) or economic (as in South Korea)—
elite networks, having preempted smaller changes over time, are less likely
to bend than to break.14
Cattle, Kgotlas, and Power
For many generations power, status, and prosperity in Botswana were based
upon the cattle trade—so much so that Robinson and Parsons (2006:120–
21) characterize Botswana at independence as a “beefocracy.” Local chiefs,
with their inner circles of relatives and cattle owners, managed land and
production issues, settled disputes, and ruled communities through the
kgotla—assemblies at which the chief “not only delivered judgments and
laws but where he listened to his people” (Peters 1994:33). Kgotlas, which
likely emerged early in the nineteenth century, were not democratic bod-
ies; only males could attend, and while all could speak, the normal strat-
egy was to build consensus behind decisions the chief and his cadre had
already made. Still, power generally drew upon consensus, not birthright,
and the chief was no autocrat: while dissent was normally muted, discus-
sions on controversial matters could show that more contributions were
needed in order to build consensus. Morton (2004:347) notes a Tswana
saying, “kgosi ke kgosi ka batho”—“a chief is a chief through the people.”
Peters (1994:27-8) adds:
The political structure entailed a strongly institutionalized central author-
ity focused on the chief, combined with strong local representation of
constituent units through the public assembly (kgotla). And the political
structure of the morafe is energized by a cultural focus on both the hero-
chief and the power of words (mafoko) wielded in the kgotla by commoners
[emphasis in original].
Consensus was reinforced by a mix of interdependence and patron-
age. Patron–client relationships were in no way equal; at best, they likely
embodied the sorts of “lopsided friendships” noted in other contexts by
Springborg (1982). A poorer individual who owned no cattle might receive
meat, hides, or (later) money from a chief, but enduring loyalty was expect-
ed in return. Yet unlike electoral machine patronage in many societies—a
system of control sustaining self-serving political monopolies—much more

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 147
was at stake in the kgotla: authority rested on ownership of resources criti-
cal to the survival of all. Ordinary individuals had meaningful claims on lo-
cal chiefs, and the chiefs themselves had real responsibilities. Authority,
though personal rather than civic, was still legitimate, secure, and based on
cooperation. Trade among villages linked chiefs on a wider basis, while the
small scale of society helped keep personal networks strong.
Governing a State
After independence the chiefly class became the core leadership for the
state—a development seen in several other African countries. But Botswa-
na’s leadership class was legitimate: like leaders elsewhere they openly laid
claim to traditional authority, but they did so through the kgotla and its
mutual obligations. Because the new political class could draw upon a heri-
tage of effective rule at the local level and extensive personal ties that had
not been disrupted by colonialism, it was secure; contending viewpoints,
parties, and interests thus did not threaten the state or regime. Further,
leading figures had personal stakes in sound economic institutions and
secure property rights—attributes often assumed to require legal-rational
foundations—which both positioned the nation for growth and enabled
elites to continue to make money. Just as Weber postulated, capitalist mar-
kets can flourish when patrimonial elites are presented with the appropri-
ate incentives.
The resulting regime governed in a paternalistic, yet open and effective
manner, and it drew strength from traditional structures. Seretse Khama,
cofounder in 1962 of the Bechuanaland (later Botswana) Democratic Party
BDP) and the first president of the new republic, drew prestige from being
chief of the Ngwato (see Robinson & Parsons 2006), and the BDP aggres-
sively drew village chiefs and kgotlas into its base. In a manner reminiscent,
perhaps, of a chief and his inner circle, government officials and BDP lead-
ers cooperated extensively in building support for their policies and can-
didates. But the regime was also held accountable by popular sentiments
expressed in local kgotlas, as well as in less traditional settings such as Free-
dom Square gatherings and party nomination caucuses. Good (1992:73)
sums up the resulting fusion of traditional power and an effective state:
Strengths of this kind, from precisely where they counted, had not ap-
peared overnight. They were in a real sense simply the just deserts of a
chieftaincy located in commercial agriculture, which also possessed long
experience of government and social control. A rising rural capitalist class
had made a successful transition from political power in pre-colonial soci-
eties to the new nation-state.
Despite internal frictions more or less inevitable in any party dominant
for over four decades, the BDP continues to hold power. Competing parties
have gradually increased their share of the vote; still, in 2004, in an elec-

148 African Studies Review
tion that The Economist (2004) termed “admirably dull,” the BDP won 51.7
percent of the vote and took forty-four of the fifty-seven popularly elected
seats in the sixty-three-seat lower house. Opposition parties are occasionally
threatened with banishment should they endanger national unity or any
segment of the population, but criticism of the government is tolerated and
opposition rights are generally secure. When Mogae stepped down in April
2008 and handed over power to his vice president, he was praised for not
clinging to power in the style of other rulers.15
Traditional elements of the regime’s legitimacy do not necessarily con-
flict with Botswana’s formal institutions. During the 1990s, for example,
bureaucrats blocked implementation of rangeland privatization policies
enacted by the National Assembly on grounds of professional disagreement
with privatization as a strategy for managing arid lands. Their control over
advisory committees effectively stalled privatization for nearly a decade, in
spite of the interests of politicians in seeing the policy implemented (see
Poteete 2003a, 2003b). Similarly, when a temporary slump in diamond mar-
kets threatened growth in the early 1980s, the government responded with
grants and subsidies. While the program rewarded the loyalty of a range of
business leaders and rural communities, it was also well administered and
targeted to real entrepreneurs, sustaining the industry until market condi-
tions improved.
What Does Botswana Show Us?
In no way did Botswana turn patrimonialism into governance magic. Like
any other state it faces demands from excluded groups—notably the San—
as well as from women seeking a full voice in government. At some point
the BNP will lose an election; whether it will hand over power seems less in
question than whether any successor government can draw upon the multi-
stranded ties and loyalties that have sustained the BNP and modern state.
Politics during Botswana’s first four decades has been strikingly nonideo-
logical (see Molomo 2000); that tradition fits well with personal authority
and consensus-oriented elite rule, but it raises questions about the longer-
term scope for political competition and—again—about any opposition
party’s ability to govern.
Botswana is not offered here as a model for emulation, nor as typical of
anything but itself. Its significance is that it vividly illustrates the critical dis-
tinction between types of authority and kinds of regimes. While numerous
societies with patrimonial pasts have regimes that have turned out badly, in
Botswana patrimonial practices and institutions provided a foundation—
via the kgotla and traditional patterns of leadership, accountability, and
exchange—on which more recent generations built Africa’s most solid
democratic regime. The argument is not that patrimonialism “caused” that
success, or that one African case necessarily illustrates the development of
others. Instead, the contrasts between Botswana and other cases are the
key, showing that there is nothing in patrimonialism that leads directly to

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa 149
any one regime type, and there is nothing inherent in patrimonialism to
prevent the creation of a democracy by leaders determined to do so. In
that sense, understanding the role of patrimonialism in the building of a
durable democratic regime is a much more demanding analytical test than
looking at the more numerous cases in which just a few, often sporadic,
democratic attributes would have to be accounted for.
Types of authority and types of regimes, then, are different entities.
Patrimonialism must be understood in context, evaluated for its positive as
well as negative consequences, and not be used as a one-variable explana-
tion for broad national outcomes. That sort of evaluation must keep We-
ber’s ideas at center stage, employing them accurately and in detail rather
than as “catch-all” concepts. Patrimonialism, as Weber insisted, is a form of
authority and belief, not a regime type—a kind of legitimacy, not a pathol-
ogy.
Conclusion
Many contemporary African leaders and the bureaucrats who serve them
have consciously distorted history to justify dictatorial rule on national and
local levels. Moreover, claims to historical legitimacy are echoed in the fre-
quent characterizations of African political systems as “neopatrimonial” by
Western scholars. Under a veneer of rational-legal authority imposed by co-
lonialism, a pervasive “patrimonial” or personalistic logic is said to prevail,
encouraging patronage, clientelism, corruption, and economic stagnation.
Even with the transition to democracy, forms of patrimonialism are still
seen as brakes on Africa’s future political and economic development.
The use of terms like patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism to explain
contemporary strategies of governance in Africa has had three important
consequences: (1) it has established and naturalized a supposedly charac-
teristic form of leadership and governance to the continent as a whole; (2)
it has attributed to this form of governance both the failure of African states
to operate according to the principles of liberal democracy and the “pas-
sivity” of African citizens in demanding accountability; and (3) it has located
the poor economic performance of postcolonial Africa in the political chaos
caused by “strong men” and “weak states.” It thus makes historical, political,
and economic claims about the continent as a whole, providing a neat and
consistent explanation for violence, state collapse, petty to extreme corrup-
tion, irresponsible resource allocation, and a host of other ills.
But such arguments, explicit or implicit, derive from a misreading of
Weber. The scholars making these claims often inscribe an evolutionary log-
ic to Weber’s categorization of charismatic, patrimonial, and bureaucratic
authority, invariably associating rational-legal authority with “progress” and
with Western, developed countries. In fact, a close reading of Weber shows
that he avoided evolutionary schemes and instead constructed a series of
ideal types in order to explore different forms of legitimate domination

150 African Studies Review
or authority. Weber’s goal was to understand the cultural framing of be-
liefs about the operation of legitimate power in diverse settings; he noted
that these beliefs could be compatible with many possible types of regimes.
Finally, most scholarly accounts ignore Weber’s emphasis on reciprocities
between rulers and their subjects, and his understanding that patrimonial
leaders could be held accountable by the collective. If the belief in legiti-
mate authority is lost, nothing is left but the raw power of violence. Even
leaders who build their initial following under such circumstances must
create a new legitimizing “script” in order to sustain the willingness of their
subjects to obey.
We dispute the assertion that “patrimonialism” accurately describes po-
litical realities in Africa, past or present. A more complete application of
Weber suggests that Botswana—one of Africa’s success stories—may also be
one of its most clearly “patrimonial” or “neopatrimonial” states. In Botswa-
na complex reciprocities link the government and its citizens, legitimacy is
created and reinforced through both the rule of law and personal bonds,
and a mutually constitutive relationship exists between the personal and
the public. With regard to other countries, scholars might be better served
by calling them what they are: authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, or de-
mocracies with adjectives. Not only would that be more faithful to Weber;
it would also open up fruitful comparisons with countries in Asia and Latin
America which have been precluded by the notion of African exceptional-
ism.
Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to Brenda Chalfin for organizing the panel
at the 2005 African Studies Association meetings where we presented an
early draft of this article. We would like to thank the panel discussant, Anne-
Maria Makhulu, for her critical and valuable comments on the argument.
We benefited also from the contributions by other panel members and the
audience in the lively discussion following the presentations, as well as from
the comments of several anonymous reviewers of this article. Special thanks
to Megan Pollard and Amy Pennenga for their help in preparing the final
manuscript.
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Notes
1. Weber died in 1920, leaving many unpublished manuscripts and fragments that
were later collected and edited by his students and colleagues and published
as Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society) in 1922. Later translators
used the various German editions of this work, with the Roth and Wittich trans-
lation (1978) based on the fourth German edition of 1956.
2. These critical points are explored in detail in Erdman and Engel (2007); Roth
(1978); Theobald (1982).
3. See also deGrassi (2008) on the conceptual roots of much of the neopatrimo-
nialism literature in the evolutionist tradition of modernization theory.
4. We confine our remarks to use of the terms in the context of Africa. For
broader applications of the term see Erdmann and Engel’s critique of the con-
cept (2007).
5. See (Medard (1982:166); Callaghy (1986:32–33); but see also Chabal and Daloz
(1999:4–16).
6. See Medard (1982:179); Hyden (1997:25); Hyden (2006:57–62); Lewis
(1998:144).
7. Note that Bayart seems to have abandoned the term with the publication of his
classic work, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (1993).
8. In their 1997 book the personal dictatorships category no longer exists and
the countries in this category are subsumed under the remaining categories.
Presumably, the reason for getting rid of this category is that it lacks the “insti-
tutional” character of the other categories calling into question the systemic
quality of neopatrimonialism.
9. See Gyimah-Boadi (2007); Hyden (2006:101–15); Mehler (2007:216–17);
Simon (2005:199–220); VonDoepp and Villalón (2005:1–26).
10. See also deGrassi (2008); Leonard and Straus (2003).
11. While many translations of Weber’s work are available to English-speaking
scholars, we are basing our discussion on the two-volume Economy and Society:
An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, compiled and edited by the German scholars
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (1978, a reissue of the original edition of
1968). This work is drawn from the fourth edition (1956) of Weber’s Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft (1922) as well as other writings produced at different times over

156 African Studies Review
the course of his long and productive career. Among the translators who con-
tributed to the Roth and Wittich collection are Hans Gerth, C. Wright Mills,
Talcott Parsons, and others who had produced earlier volumes of selections
from Weber’s writing and commented extensively on his work for English-
speaking audiences.
12. The discussion of Botswana here and below is based on a number of sources.
See Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2003); Robinson and Parsons (2006);
Rotberg (2004); Werbner (2004); “Economic Snapshot” (2008); Danevad
(1995); Good (1994); Samatar and Oldfield (1995); Englebert (2000b); Car-
roll and Carroll (2004); Molomo (2000); Molutsi and Holm (1990); Somolekae
2002; Peters 1984. See also Samatar (1999) for a dissenting position on whether
Botswana overcame patrimonialism or built upon it.
13. See also Weber’s criteria (1978[1922]:240) for the compatibility of patrimonial
authority with capitalist development.
14. On the subject of ethnic tension see Good (1999); Corry (2002); Taylor (2007).
On HIV/AIDS see Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2003). On the integra-
tion of political leadership see Good (1996); Holm, Molutsi, and Somolekae
(1996). On the cooptation of minority groups see Werbner (2004). On so-
called elite cartels see Johnston (2005:ch. 5).
15. However, the fact that the new president was Seretse Ian Khama, son of the
first president, raised concerns in other quarters about a dynastic presidency
(MSNBC 2008).