Tongnaab

Cover

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pp. i-iv

Contents

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pp. v-

List of Maps

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pp. vii-

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-xi

Our debts in the completion of this project are many. Jean Allman’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Program, the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, the University of Minnesota, and the Research Board and Center for Advanced...

Introduction

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pp. 1-22

Neither of us set out in 1992 to become enmeshed in the history of Tongnaab. We were both busy with our separate research projects based in Ghana’s south—a social history of the capital, Accra, and a history of gender and colonialism in Asante—when we decided to take a break and together visit the northern savanna region of the country. Like...

1. Tongnaab and the Talensi in the History of the Middle Volta Savanna

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pp. 23-71

The history of Tongnaab and its Talensi guardians before the colonial conquest of 1911 remains beyond the reach of detailed reconstruction. While British documents and the oral testimonies of elderly informants provide enough evidence to piece together the opening phase of colonial encounter, the precolonial Tong Hills emerge only in the vaguest of outlines.

2. Gods and Guns, Rituals and Rule, 1911-1928

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pp. 72-105

When the Whiteman first came to your country you were backward and primitive, a prey to slave raiders from the north and south. You had no cohesion and in many cases no constitution to speak of which was really the root of your troubles.� We were once the owners of this land; since the scorpion Europeans came we have entered into holes. You have burned our bows and arrows; we once were keepers of the moons.� For the British, the conquest of the Tong Hills...

3. "Watch Over Me": Witchcraft and Anti-witchcraft Movements in Ghanaian History, 1870s-1920s

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pp. 106-142

By the 1920s, the pilgrimage network focused on the Tong Hills began to expand beyond its established heartland to Asante and the Gold Coast. Tongnaab’s passage across the savanna-forest divide represents the key shift in the twentieth-century history of the bo’ar cult—a shift that occurred in three overlapping phases. First, the imposition of colonial rule and the refashioning...

4. From Savanna to Forest: Nana Tongo and Ritual Commerce in the World of Cash and Cocoa

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pp. 143-181

Persons who have consulted the Fetish are satisfied that they received value for their money.¹ As we have seen, a significant expansion in Tongnaab’s ritual field was well under way by the time of R. S. Rattray’s visit in 1928. Building upon the established mobility of the great bo’a in its savanna heartland, ritual intermediaries like Tengol began to grant to favored southern pilgrims the right to transport Tongnaab’s...

5. Tongnaab, Meyer Fortes, and the Making of Colonial Taleland, 1928-1945

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pp. 182-216

The inter-war period witnessed the greatest efflorescence of organized witchcraft eradication in Ghanaian history. Expanding physical mobility and ritual commerce enabled the peoples of southern Ghana to draw on the powers of distant savanna shrines and to deploy those powers in new and innovative ways. They did so in order to reinforce their spiritual armory in the face of a growing range of...

6. Tongnaab and the Dynamics of History among the Talensi

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pp. 217-236

R. S. Rattray sketched them onto the edges of an amorphous Asante hinterland. Meyer Fortes painted them into intricate webs of kinship that, in their overlapping complexity, embodied wider dynamics of clanship. For decades the western ethnographic pen, sometimes retracing the very lines drawn by early colonial officials, interned the Talensi and their gods in a timeless, unchanging present.

Glossary

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pp. 237-238

Notes

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pp. 239-277

Bibliography

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pp. 279-292

Index

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pp. 293-301