Indigenous Leaders, Taxes and Levies in Rural KwaZulu-Natal: A Challenge of Institutional Fragmentation

The imposition of colonial rule in Southern Africa precipitated the restructuring of indigenous political institutions while at the same time allowing them to retain most of their pre-colonial form but within the context of a new colonial dispensation. Consequently, indigenous forms of governance were aligned with the interests of colonialism. In the case of British colonialism the designs of Lord Lugard on colonial administration had a strong influence on those territories that at one point came under British colonial influence. In Natal, Theophilus Shepstone administered Africans through a system that contained many of the features of indirect rule that dominated British colonial administration in the twentieth century. Most of the countries functioned through an administrative model that allowed indigenous institutions to survive while their structures functioned as intermediaries between the colonial state and the colonized population. For instance, cases involving the indigenous population were dealt with under Nguni customary law while those involving whites were dealt with under Roman-Dutch law.