Mahmood Mamdani describes African states as “bifurcated states” that institutionalized two different modes of state-society relations: a civic, republican mode for the urban areas, and an authoritarian, nonliberal mode for the rural areas. As Mamdani's analysis suggests, a subnational rural jurisdiction in which chiefly authority holds sway is not a miniature version of a national arena organized around a republican form of government. Although local units are nested into a national hierarchy, the modes of political representation, association, participation, and contestation that prevail at different levels of the system are not necessarily the same. Where a chiefly jurisdiction is nested into a national administrative hierarchy, the character and procedures of the national state are at least formally bureaucratic, secular, and constitutional, whereas at the local level, the character of public authority and government is at least partially hereditary, neocustomary, and nonsecular. African political systems are thus marked by what Schattschneider (1960) and Gibson (2005, 2012) have described as heterogeneity of scale.