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  • Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana
  • Gariba B. Abdul-Korah
Carola Lentz. Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xi + 346 pp. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. Cloth.

The construction of ethnicity and identity in African societies has sustained scholarly attention since the 1960s; in their probing, historians of southern and central Africa developed “the thesis that ‘tribes’ were colonial constructs which were not rooted in a timeless past” (Carola Lentz and Paul Nugent, eds., Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention [Palgrave Macmillan, 2000], 5). Employing an impressive range of sources, including oral interviews, colonial ethnographies, clan histories, archival material, and other secondary literature produced by local intellectuals, Carola Lentz moves beyond this narrow and “one-sided” view of the construction of ethnicity to foreground the ways in which multiple actors (mainly colonial officials, missionaries, chiefs, labor migrants, and educated elites), with their diverse interests, worked hand-in-hand to invent or redefine indigenous ethnic categories and commonalities in Nandom, and in the northern Ghana Lawra district as a whole.

Recognizing that the complex relationship between “ethnicity and alternative bases of commonality” (4) can be understood only from a historical perspective, Lentz provides a social and political history of northwestern Ghana that is not just about the invention of ethnic categories and their interconnectedness with pre-existing modes of social positioning and belonging, but also about the very nature of the encounter between Africans and Europeans, in this case, the Dagara and British colonial officials. In analyzing the complex sociopolitical organization of precolonial Dagara, Lentz argues that even though precolonial northwestern Ghana lacked centralized political structures and was not “inhabited by distinct ‘tribes,’” notions of ethnicity and a sense of belonging to distinct ethnic groups existed, which labor migrants used and continue to use to establish social networks away from home—in southern Ghana (1). In essence, labor migrants utilized “indigenous principles of organization” (patriclans, earth shrines, and neighborliness) to create “new idioms of solidarity” (150), many of which conveyed ethnic overtones, to emphasize ties transcending patriclans and village boundaries.

In this historical context, Lentz traces the history of chieftaincy in the [End Page 135] Lawra district, emphasizing that chieftaincy in the colonial era gradually transformed “native states” to conform to the British model: small, territorial states and kingdoms. Chiefs were to serve as intermediaries between their subjects and the colonial administration. However, “to legitimatize their claims to authority and expand their influence, [colonial-imposed] chiefs not only re-interpreted oral traditions but also appropriated the British ‘tribal’ discourse” in the performance of their duties (2).

In the 1930s, Christian missionaries in the area converted thousands of Dagara and enunciated a new sense of ethnic consciousness when they reduced the local language into writing—creating what Benedict Anderson has termed “imagined communities” which transcended colonial tribal boundaries, chiefdoms, and districts, and created common identities extending well beyond the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. What is more, mission schools both produced an educated elite “socialized to think ethnically,” and engaged in “cultural work” to generate histories on origins, early migration, culture, and political idioms to promote their own agendas on ethnicity (2).

By going beyond the “colonial construction of knowledge” to pose new questions on the fluidity of ethnicity, and ways of reviewing the encounter between Africans and British colonial officials in the Lawra district, Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana offers new research avenues on ethnicity, especially in stateless or noncentralized African societies.

The strength of this book lies in its methodology. It is thoroughly researched, well written, and solidly grounded in the lived experiences of the Dagara. In actuality, with research derived from the author’s repeated trips to Ghana over a period of twenty years—which allowed her virtually to become part of the story that she tells—her account is based largely on her first-hand observation of some of the socioeconomic and political changes in Ghana as a whole, and the Lawra district in particular over that time. Such rich observations inform her presentation on the “political dimension of ethnicity.”

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