Wyatt MacGaffey - Chiefs, Priests, and Praise-singers: History, Politics, and Land Ownership in Northern Ghana

Chiefs, Priests, and Praise-Singers

History, Politics,
and Land Ownership
in Northern Ghana

University of Virginia Press
2013 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2013
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
MacGaffey, Wyatt.

Chiefs, priests, and praise-singers : history, politics, and land ownership in northern Ghana / Wyatt MacGaffey.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3386-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8139-3387-0 (e-book)

1. Dagbani (African people)History. 2. Dagbani (African people)Politics and government. 3. Dagbani (African people)Land tenure. 4. ChiefdomsGhanaNorthern Region. 5. Local governmentGhanaNorthern Region. 6. Land tenureGhanaNorthern Region. 7. Dagomba (Ghana)Historiography. 8. Dagomba (Ghana)Politics and government. I. Title.

DT510.43.D34M33 2013

966.70049635dc23 2012030531

From 1996 to 2012 I visited Tamale, in northern Ghana, for about two months each year. Because my wife, Dr. Susan Herlin, who was given the chiefly title, or skin, Tamale Zo-Simli Na in 1995, is from Texas by way of Kentucky, and because she decided to take her title seriously rather than to treat it as the equivalent of an honorary degree, we needed and benefited from the constant advice of her elders, which amounted to an extended education in traditional conduct, a life known to few foreigners and increasingly unknown to educated townspeople. As a chief en-skinned by the Ya Na, the king of Dagbon, she respects her customary obligations to the hierarchy of her fellow chiefs and has several times paraded with them through Tamale on horseback during the annual Damba festival. Because her skin is an honor conferred jointly by the traditional hierarchy and the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly, she is also in frequent contact with the chief executive (the mayor), with elected members of the assembly, and with the administration of the Northern Region. Her work in education and development projects, in collaboration with her elders and supporters, helped us to know politicians, chiefs, schools, schoolchildren, and villages both urban and rural; it built such a reputation for her that wherever I went in remote parts of Dagbon I could count on a warm welcome as Zo-Simli Na yidana, her husband. Later, the chief and people of the village of Foshegu gave me an identity of my own, the much lowlier title Saba Na, which people always prefer to use rather than a proper name and for which I am grateful.

I did not set out to do research or to question the history of Dagbon, but gradually that history revealed itself as the ideological foundation of what was happening around me, as people constantly made reference in contemporary disputes to events and conjunctures in the past. I do not speak Dagbani and was therefore dependent in some contexts on translators and assistants. I am well aware of the limitations of this kind of research, but I was able to become familiar with people and events over a long period of time, to visit and revisit, developing a sense of the issues that seemed important. Arriving each year after a lapse of time made clear the pace of modernization and the rapid decline of all things traditional.

I have done my best to follow the advice of E. F. Tamakloe, who wrote that researchers will do well if they are conversant, liberal, kind, unbul-lying, affable, patient and neither friends nor foes to anyone. For explaining matters and for opening doors for me I am indebted to, among many others, the late Dulogulana Ebenezer Adam, the late Dakpema Richard Alhassan, VoNa the Honorable M. B. Bawa, Alhaji Mohammed Haroon, Alhaji Abdulai Haruna (sometime district chief executive of Savelugu, later metropolitan chief executive of Tamale), Zubwogu Na H. Abukari Kaleem, Alhaji Ibrahim Mahama, Prince Mohammed, Hajia Fati Munkaila, Ahmed Rufai (then municipal coordinating director of Tolon-Kumbungu), the late Gulkpeogu Ngwo Na Musah Sugre, the staff of the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) in Tamale, my wulana, Samson Adam, and especially my assistants, Alhassan Iddris Gallant, Zo-Simli LunNa Issa Yakubu, Yusif Sad, and Choggo Zi-Sung Na Abdul-Somed Shahadu. Like all who wish to think about Dagbon today, I owe a great deal to Martin Stanilands The Lions of Dagbon, in his own words a disquieting mixture of history, political science, and anthropology, and wonderfully so. I thank Allegra Churchill and Lindsay Cameron for photographs; Professor Justin McCarthy, of the University of Louisville, for making the maps; and David Locke for introducing me to the late Alhaji Abubakari Lunna. In revising my manuscript I was greatly aided by the reports of the University of Virginia Presss readers and by the hard work of my editor, Joanne Allen (none of my previous books was ever so thoroughly edited). The remaining mistakes, ambiguities, and omissions are my own. I am grateful to Haverford College for occasional help with travel expense and for the support of its computer center.

PRAAD Accra and especially PRAAD Tamale provided indispensable resources. Unfortunately, in Tamale the classification system cited by Staniland, for example, as NAG, ADM, and so on, has been replaced; the new system uses NRG, and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to establish correspondence between the two. Moreover, the files in Tamale, heavily used, are in very bad condition. Old paper is disintegrating, file numbers may be illegible, documents have been misplaced, and some material is missing. A project of the British Library to digitize the records and thus save what we have, initiated by Professor Ismael Montana, of Northern Illinois University, was being carried out in 2010. Quotations from unfiled letters are taken from copies in my possession.

I have used both Ibrahim Mahamas Dagbani-English Dictionary and the provisional Dagbani Dictionary prepared by Roger Blench. The first was written and published in Tamale by a native speaker; the second is the product of a progressive collaboration begun by H. A. Blair and E. F. Tamakloe in 1940 and continued since then by scholars and professional linguists but still unfinished in 2004. It is readily available online at http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/Niger-Congo/Gur/Dagbani%20dictionary%20CD.pdf . The two dictionaries use different orthographies. According to Knut J. Olawsky, one of the linguists, Orthographic standards are not even consistent within publications by one and the same author, since the writing rules are not fixed and writers cannot be sure about how to write certain words. Blench adds that present writing systems do not accurately represent the sounds of the language.

My compromises may please nobody. In this book, as a rough guide to pronunciation certain words of particular interest are written using three special letters: