Carola Lentz

Ethnicity in Ghana: a comparative perspective

By comparison with some African countries where ethnicity casts an imposing shadow over public debate it has manifested itself in a variable and episodic manner in Ghana.1 While the history of twentieth-century Ghana could certainly not be written without reference to ethnicity, nor could it serve as a central organising principle without distorting the totality of the picture. Perhaps because ethnicity has proved so elusive, less attention has been paid to its study than in many countries with a comparable research literature. However, the passage of recent events, most notably the fresh eruption of conflict in the Northern Region in 1994, renders a reconsideration of ethnicity extremely timely. But even in the absence of such dramatic events there would have been a strong case for turning the focus back on a neglected area of enquiry. Given that a number of researchers on Ghana have begun to revisit the study of ethnicity, nationalism and the politics of identity, it seemed appropriate to arrange a forum at which research agendas and perspectives could be discussed. The purpose was both to consider what recent advances in the study of ethnicity have to teach those who work primarily on Ghana, and to consider ways in which the Ghanaian experience might shed light on issues of continental (and possibly wider) concern.2 Judging from the lively response to a call for papers, and from the spirited discussions at the Edinburgh symposium itself, the timing of our initiative could not have been better.

Colonial Constructions and African Initiatives: The History of Ethnicity in Northwestern Ghana

The article discusses the colonial construction of ethnic categories, their linkage with precolonial models of identity and the multiple meanings which ethnicity has assumed for different groups over the past decades, using the example of northwestern Ghana – a region which, in the precolonial period, was neither politically centralized nor knew distinct ‘tribes’. The article analyses how ethnic categories, boundaries and institutions were created and continually redefined by colonial officials, anthropologists, chiefs, labour migrants and educated elites, and how the different ethnic discourses fed into each other. It also draws on some of the older literature on ethnicity in Africa because it can still contribute to our understanding of the making of ethnic identities when framed in a deeply historical approach.

OF HUNTERS, GOATS AND EARTH-SHRINES: SETTLEMENT HISTORIES AND THE POLITICS OF ORAL TRADITION IN NORTHERN GHANA

The present paper deals with the settlement history of a West African agricultural society, that of the Dagara in present-day northwestern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso. In it, I shall be particularly interested in the appropriation of space, which is ritually legitimized through the acquisition of earth-shrines, and in the conflict-ridden relationships between the in-migrating Dagara and the Sisala, who were already settled in their new habitat. My primary concern, however, is not to examine the Dagaras expansion strategies or the history of interethnic conflicts as such, but their working out in disputed oral traditions. Using the example of the controversial settlement history of Nandom (see map 1), I wish to show how Africans, both today and in the colonial past, have used oral traditions in order to conduct politics. I shall discuss the methodological implications that this mutual constitution of oral traditions and political interests has for the reconstruction of settlement history and examine the possibilities of a thorough criticism of sources to detect core elements of the historical settlement process and appropriation of space as well as the presentday confrontations with history. Oral traditions have played an important role in research into African history and societies. This is because in many places it was European missionaries and colonial masters who first introduced literacy and writing, and because we have only a few written sources—sometimes none at all—for the period up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Local culture in the national arena: The politics of cultural festivals in Ghana

Abstract: In Ghana, regional and local cultural festivals that recently have been created or “modernized” provide an interface between local communities and the state. At these festivals, local political elites formulate demands on the government, and conversely, the government attempts to popularize its policies. At the same time, cultural festivals function as public arenas where local cultural identities are articulated within a framework negotiated by the state and the media. The staging of local culture thus always has a national dimension, even when the material is of local origin. Public self-representation at cultural festivals can also be an important factor in internal integration of local societies. The article examines these themes with reference to cultural festivals in northwestern Ghana which the author has observed and whose organizers and participants she has interviewed since 1989.

ARROWS AND EARTH SHRINES: TOWARDS A HISTORY OF DAGARA EXPANSION IN SOUTHERN BURKINA FASO

The history of the Black Volta region in what is currently south-west Burkina Faso and north-west Ghana has been marked by the agricultural expansion of Dagara-speaking groups. This article explores how and why these groups were able to expand at the expense of neighbouring segmentary societies such as the Phuo and the Sisala. Violence certainly played a role in their territorial expansion, but so did specific strategies of ritual appropriation of new territories. The Dagara system, with its characteristic fission of existing earth shrines and networks of interlinked shrines, allowed mobility and helped the migrants bring new territories under their ritual control. In addition, patriclans and matriclans as well as joking relationships, clan alliances and institutionalized friendship enabled the Dagara pioneers to recruit many new settlers within a short time. This was a crucial asset for the security of the newly founded settlements and the territorial encroachment on Phuo and Sisala lands. In addition, mobility was, and continues to be, supported by an explicit ethos of independence and autonomy. Focusing on the late pre-colonial periods, the article looks at different stages of Dagara expansion and the changing interethnic relations.

Of Trees and Earth Shrines: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Settlement Histories in the West African Savanna

For a vegetation geographer and an anthropologist to come together to write on the settlement histories of segmentary societies in the West African savanna is unusual or at least rare. A few words on the origin of this cooperation therefore seem appropriate. For over ten years, in the context of an interdisciplinary research program at the Universitat Frankfurt am Main, archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, botanists and geographers have been working together on the history of cultures, languages, and natural environment of the West African savanna, especially the interaction between human activity and the natural environment. That one should actually be speaking in many cases of a culturally mediated “landscape” rather than a “natural environment” is one of the outcomes of the research projects, which have focused mainly on different regions of Burkina Faso (in the sahel and Sudanese zone) and the Lake Chad area of northeast Nigeria. The present paper has emerged from a botanical and an anthropological-historical project on the history of vegetation and of settlement in south and southwest Burkina Faso. This history has been shaped by the great expansion of the Dagara-speaking population. In the last two hundred years (possibly longer), small groups of Dagara patrilineages, related and allied to one another, have migrated north and northwest, probably from the region around Wa in present-day Ghana, and have founded numerous new settlements—a process of land appropriation that is still going on today, though with changed circumstances regarding land rights (see map 1).

Contested identities: the history of ethnicity in northwestern Ghana

My case study of northwestern Ghana analyses how ethnic categories, boundaries and institutions were created and continually defined anew by colonial officials, missionaries, anthropologists, chiefs, migrant workers and educated elites in a region which in the pre-colonial period was neither politically centralised nor knew distinct ‘tribes’.1 The effectiveness of ethnic discourses is based on the fact that they transfer the emotional power of categories such as ‘family’, ‘village’ and ‘home’ on to larger communities. By claiming to be primordial and non-negotiable, because defined through birth, an ethnic identity creates bindedness, permanence and thus security. But it also excludes, producing need and insecurity. Yet the exact boundaries of this quasi-natural community, and the specific properties and practices with which an ethnic identity is connoted, are extraordinarily malleable according to interests and context, though certainly only within the framework of historically available ‘materials’. In the research underlying this chapter the concern above all is with the history of the different interpretations of ethnic boundaries and contents, and the political conflicts bound up with them. I am concentrating especially on the linkages of ethnic with other collective identities and the relations of tension between territorial and linguistic-cultural definitions of ethnic boundaries.2

The Time When Politics Came: Ghana's Decolonisation From the Perspective of a Rural Periphery

By winning the Ghanaian elections of 2000, the New Patriotic Party constituted for the first time since 1969 a government in the tradition of the Danquah-Busia bloc. And significantly, because the acronym ‘NPP’ is the same as that of the 1950s Northern Peoples’ Party (a regional opposition party to Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples’ Party [CPP]), it evoked a particular continuity of political tradition for voters in the north of the country.

The politics and aesthetics of commemoration: national days in southern Africa

The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the introduction first discusses the role of the state in national celebrations, highlighting three themes: firstly, the political power-play and contested politics of memory involved in the creation of a countrys festive calendar; secondly, the relationship between state control of national days and civic or popular participation or contestation; and thirdly, the complex relationship between regional and ethnic loyalties and national identifications. It then turns to the role of performance and aesthetics in the making of nations in general, and in national celebration...

Creating Ethnic Identities in North-western Ghana

Pre-colonially, Africans were not organized in ‘tribes’, culturally and linguistically distinct, internally homogeneous groups, inhabiting a clearly demarcated territory and enjoying some degree of political autonomy (an Africanized version of the European nation-state concept). On the contrary, the dominant characteristics of pre-colonial Africa were mobility, overlapping networks, multiple group membership, and the flexible, context-dependent drawing of boundaries. The concept of ‘tribe’, and the idea that each person belongs to one and only one ‘tribe’, is a colonial import. This contention has become conventional wisdom among Africanists, historians as well as anthropologists, since the path breaking studies of Lonsdale (1977), Iliffe (1979), Ranger (1983), and many others, from the late 1970s onwards.2