PARAMOUNT CHIEFTAINSHIP

Paramount Chieftainship is political system similar to a kingdom that brings together a number of partly autonomous villages or communities under the hierarchical rule of a grand chief

Paramount Chieftain is also a title created during the Colonial era by British administrators as a substitute for the word "king" in order to maintain that only the British monarch held that title.

Paramount chieftainship is the highest-level traditional chieftainship or political leadership in a regional or local polity or country.

The Wallisian version of Polynesian identity or, in short, Wallisian identity, is composed of a specific socioeconomic, political and ideological system which, analogous to the situation in other western-Polynesian societies such as Tonga, Futuna, Samoa and Rotuma, may be defined as a configuration of the following four features: (1) a paramount chieftainship and corresponding system of asymmetrical ideology based on the mana-taboo complex; (2) the dominant role of cognatic kinship in the social relations of production, distribution and politics; (3) a form of land ownership which is structured by principles of both chieftainship and (cognatic) kinship; (4) a subsistence-, barter- and gift economy in which pigs, root crops, seafood, kava, mats and tapa play a predominant part (Van der Grijp 2001 and n.d.a).

Paul van der Grijp: Strategic Murders. Social Drama in Tonga’s Chiefly System (Western Polynesia)
Article deals with a chain of social dramas typical of an important part of the civil war in Tonga (Western Polynesia), a period of decline of the paramount chieftainship which was a continuation and intensification of an already existing competition between the Tongan chiefs. Here, this competition and the resulting social dramas - with distant parallels in Hawaiian history - are conceived as rather cyclical than unusual states of warfare. The major research questions of this article are: How was the disintegration of the Tongan system of paramount chieftainship brought about? and: What were its implications? In analyzing a selection of historical ethnography from a political anthropological point of view, the metaphor of social drama, adapted from Victor Turner, will be used as an analytical tool. [Polynesia, Tonga, chiefs, war, murder, social drama, political anthropology]

BASUTOLAND AND ITS NEW PARAMOUNT CHIEF
TRACEY Afr Aff (Lond).1940; afraf.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/XXXIX/CLVII/306.pdf

Bingu practising tribalism—Muluzi
by NATION REPORTER (10/12/2008) - nationmw.net
Extract: [History professor at Chancellor College Kings Phiri said the Lomwe tribe has had no paramount chief because it is a tribe which had no centralised system of government and the installation of one now could be political.
"It is very difficult for me as historian to accurately assess the way people are elevated nowadays. There is so much politics in it. Historically, the Lomwe did not have paramount chiefs. They came to Malawi under a clan and it was difficult in 1930s for the colonial government to entrust them with duties. Their chiefs were challenged and so the government had to create chiefs in their own areas," said Phiri.
He said paramount chieftainship would apply to the Ngonde, Tumbuka of Rumphi, the Chewa, Ngoni and Yao because they had centralised system of government.
"But it is an issue over which no light can be thrown from historians," said Professor Phiri.]

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