House of Chiefs

A House of Chiefs (or House of Traditional Leaders) is a post-colonial assembly, either legislative or advisory, that is recognised by either a national or regional government as consisting of and providing a collective, public voice for an ethnic group's pre-colonial authorities. Although often influential within the indigenous culture, its members do not usually function as a modern nation's primary law-making body (cf. British House of Lords), being neither representative (i.e. democratically elected) nor consisting of members appointed individually by the government in power, whether democratic or not. It consists of all or some of the "traditional leaders", historically known in English as chiefs, of a country or a sub-division thereof.

A House of Chiefs is not, constitutionally, a partisan institution within the body politic. Members of a House of Chiefs are selected neither by a universal suffrage process of those they represent nor by the state executive or legislature they advise: Their function is to express a cultural, historical and/or ethnic point of view on public policies. The process by which individuals qualify for membership varies, but is based on tradition specific to his or her (e.g. the Rain Queen) historic community or ethnic group. Sometimes the qualifying position is obtained through heredity within a local dynasty, sometimes through selection by consensus of a ritually or socially prominent subset of a community, and sometimes by a combination thereof.

Historically, chiefs were the last indigenous rulers before colonisation of a people, and their modern versions often continue to play a local cultural role of varying significance. Especially in colonial times, chiefs were often used as instruments of indirect rule, and/or convenient alternatives to elective institutions.

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