Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa: Natives and Strangers

Preface

ix Preface Parts of this book were written, or rather rewritten, after I had become increasingly critical of earlier drafts, during a sabbatical year at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University in 2008−9. While struggling to reconceptualize the book’s central narrative, and how I could make the very rich, but also overly complex and local material from remote corners of Ghana and Burkina Faso more interesting for a broader readership, I often interrupted desk work with a stretch of jogging along the Charles River that traverses Cambridge. Many times had I run past a memorial stone at Sir Richard’s Landing and in passing glanced at its inscription, until one day it dawned on me that this stone had everything to do with the stories of African “first-comers” and founders of settlements over which I was musing. The stone had been placed on Cambridge lands by inhabitants of the neighboring city of Watertown, and its inscription read: Here at this river’s edge, the settlers of Watertown led by Sir Richard Saltonstall landed July 30, 1630. Here, Reverend George Phillips’ protest in 1632 against taxation without representation struck the first note of civil liberty heard in this wilderness. All of the territory from Sparks Street to Mount Auburn bridge, originally a part of Watertown, was annexed to Cambridge in 1754. Erected by the Historical Society of Watertown, 1948. Here, carved in stone, was an American version of a first-comer narrative, invoking arguments to boost territorial claims and assertions of property that resonated very much with my West African interlocutors’ contentions. The amateur historians of Watertown wanted to remind all passersby that their ancestors, and not the later Cambridgean occupants, had been the very first persons to discover and set foot on this land. Of course, they failed to mention any Indian inhabitants who might have happened to live in the area prior to Sir Richard’s landing—a typical strategy of firstcomer narratives that implicitly define who belongs to the potential claimants while completely silencing the claims of others. As if this were not enough, the authors of the inscription added that discovery and occupation were followed by an important political act, namely taming the “wilderness” and thus taking a leading role in preparing the road to American democracy. Almost two hundred years had passed since the land originally owned by Watertownians had been “annexed” by Cambridge—a turn of phrase that insinuates an illegitimate act—and yet some Watertown patriots felt impelled to set the historical record right by erecting a commemorative stone that memorialized their moral right as first-comers to the territory they later lost. x | Preface African village elders and earth priests, when they wanted to convince me (and others) of their legitimate property rights or of the injustice they had suffered in being dispossessed of land, presented very similar claims of discovery, first possession, and taming of the wilderness into which their ancestors had moved. And although they did not erect commemorative stones with lengthy inscriptions, my African interlocutors , too, pointed to landmarks, such as rivers, hills, rock outcroppings, or remarkable trees, where specific events were supposed to have taken place and that now served as mnemonic devices, a kind of aide-mémoire, to support the stories. In some places, annual communal hunting expeditions to these landmarks and walks along the village boundaries, interspersed with sacrifices, kept the villagers’ memory of the settlement history alive and transmitted this knowledge to the younger generation. In the savanna hinterland of Burkina Faso and Ghana, where the modern state has not yet established any written registers of land titles, the settlement narratives, and the commemorative practices that punctuate them, serve as a kind of oral land registry . For the local population, the question of who owned the land is inextricably tied to the issue of who came first. The often contradictory details of hunter narratives and other stories of founding a settlement that so bewildered me during fieldwork—and that my interlocutors found so important—aim at determining whose ancestors were the first to establish themselves in a place, how those perceived as late-comers were incorporated or excluded, and which rights the purported first-comers had transferred to later immigrants. Violence and coercion certainly were, and sometimes continue to be, important for gaining access to and appropriating land, but they alone cannot ensure long-term, uninterrupted use; the latter needs to be...