Chiefs, Priests, and Praise-Singers: History, Politics, and Land Ownership in Northern Ghana

Preface

Preface 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 “enskinned ” 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 trans- viii PREFACE lators 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, unbullying , 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, Vo’Na 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 Lun’Na Issa Yakubu, Yusif Saïd, and Choggo Zi-Sung Na Abdul-Somed Shahadu. Like all who wish to think about Dagbon today, I owe a great deal to Martin Staniland’s 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 Press’s 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...