Chiefs, Priests, and Praise-Singers: History, Politics, and Land Ownership in Northern Ghana by Wyatt MacGaffey (review)

In this stellar book, Wyatt MacGaffey observes that the “problems of land tenure are among the most serious that Ghana faces.” He argues that “the history of land tenure and its modern problems is intimately bound up with that of chieftaincy” (144). His concentration on the politics and history of the Dagbon Kingdom of Northern Ghana arose fortuitously when his wife, Dr. Susan Herlin, was given the “skin” (i.e., chiefly title) Tamale Zo-Simli Na in 1995 by the Ya Na, the king of Dagbon. As the Zo-Simli Na’s husband, MacGaffey held the “much lowlier title Saba Na” (vii). Between 1996 and 2012, MacGaffey spent about two months each year in Tamale, Ghana’s third largest city, located within the Ghanaian state’s recognized boundaries of Dagbon. MacGaffey admits that he did not set out to do research or to question the history of Dagbon but through Herlin’s work on education and development projects he came to know key chiefs, elders, and politicians, as well as villagers and schoolchildren. Through these relationships and his travels, MacGaffey perceived just how much Dagbon’s commonly received history serves as the “ideological foundation” of what was happening around him. Using a wide variety of sources, MacGaffey explores how “anthropology, historiography, colonial policy, and the canny enterprise of chiefs themselves combined to entrench a historically misleading model of chieftaincy” (34). His book is also a superb example of an applied or public anthropology that addresses contemporary African challenges without hammer-fisted prescriptions from outside “experts.” As such, the book is a vital resource for Ghanaians.

MacGaffey’s reconstruction of the political history of Northern Ghana disassembles the discourses common in the scholarship about the region. Many of these originated during the period of British administration, and the findings and conclusions of colonial era researchers and administrators remain remarkably persistent, vital, and authoritative frames of reference upon which contemporary actors rely to shape their claims and agendas. One frame is the sharp distinction fostered by colonial era anthropologists of a social evolutionist bent such as R. S. Rattray, who posited a radical difference between integrated and politically competent entities such as Dagbon or Mamprugu and “stateless” or acephalous societies such as the Konkomba and Kusasi. Instead of difference, MacGaffey stresses regional unity. According to him, Northern Ghana was, and remains, a region in which boundaries “separating states from the stateless were permeable, political structures were in constant reorganization, and identities were fluid and situational” (11). All Northern societies shared a common political culture and all were “responding to the opportunities and limitations of a common regional resource base” (11).

Rattray’s evolutionist perspective dovetails with another persistent topos: a narrative that relates how militarily proficient, more socially advanced immigrants conquered the indigenous peoples and introduced relatively secular and complex centralized dynastic states. The received invasion history for Dagbon appears in the recitations of drummer praise singers (griots). By the late fifteenth century, immigrants from what is now northern Nigeria had consolidated their winnings in the Dagbon region. Led by the warrior-king Na Nyagse, they eliminated or marginalized the autochthonous leaders, the tindanas, usually translated by scholars as “Earth Priests” but referred to by colonial officials and in Dagbon today, somewhat pejoratively, as “Fetish Priests.” Secular chiefs, as representatives of this new political and military political system, replaced the tindanas, whose concerns were more spiritual than political. The standard invasion narrative thus separates political functions from what were perceived as religious ones, a separation that would be in keeping with British notions of more evolved political systems vital to colonial Indirect Rule strategies and congruent with the political and economic interests of Dagbon chiefs, both during the colonial period and at present.

The dichotomy between “religious” tindanas and secular chiefs carries with it the “political implication that tindanas should be excluded from public affairs, especially the administration of land...