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

3. Tindanas and Chiefs: Ethnography

The ritual administration of nam to create chieftaincy is conducted by tindanas, who are also responsible for the conduct of sacrifices at territorial shrines. One of the arguments of this book is that the chief-tindana couple is fundamental to northern culture and its historical development . The ethnography of Dagbon, largely based on the assumption of cultural difference between invaders and autochthons, builds spurious contrasts between patrilineal and matrilineal succession to office and between the secular and religious functions of officeholders, respectively, chiefs and tindanas. This chapter questions the exclusive religiosity attributed to tindanas, discusses the similarities and differences between them and chiefs, and shows that there is a single, bilateral succession system that responds flexibly to distributions of power. The next chapter reveals certain essential links between chiefs and tindanas and attempts to rewrite the history of Dagbon accordingly. The foundational myth of Dagbon, the story of Na Nyagse’s conquest and the slaughter of the tindanas, was outlined in chapter 1. Since it is, and always has been, well known that the tindanas were not eliminated, the cognitive dissonance that allows general acceptance of the story needs to be explained. In African studies, historians and anthropologists have disagreed about conquests and their aftermath. Conquest stories commonly introduce a division of labor between the conquerors and the conquered, who are relegated to a religious role that includes guardianship of earth shrines and blessing the political role of the conqueror’s descendants. This development as it occurred among the Mosse seemed only natural to James George Frazer and apparently also to most historians , not only in the savanna region but elsewhere in Africa. In Central Africa, historians, as well as some anthropologists, have been inclined to recognize as myths only stories involving persons we regard as su3 tindanas and Chiefs Ethnography 70 CHIEFS, PRIESTS, AND PRAISE-SINGERS pernatural and, conversely, as Hayden White puts it in his comments on historiography in general, to accept as historical events those “that lend themselves to the understanding of whatever currently passes for common sense.”1 Invasion stories have been too readily accepted as history rather than myth; Central African examples show, however, that the firstcomer/latecomer opposition is more constant than the stories that purport to account for it and therefore corresponds to a need that goes beyond historical contingencies.2 Meyer Fortes described the fundamental cleavage in Tale society as lying between the autochthonous Talis and the immigrant Namoos, who wore cloth in the style of the nearby Mamprusi chiefs, but he declared, “The cleavage is not an artifact of history but the expression of a deeplying principle of social organization.” Some clans held both tendaan and na’am offices (Talni terms cognate with Dagbani tindana and nam), and some offices had attributes of both.3 On the political history of the Mosse, Michel Izard, following Dominique Zahan, writes that the kingdoms were formed by a succession of conquests, or purported conquests, that established them in an evolutionary process such that each wave of newcomers became “indigenous” in due course, after the next invasion.4 Historians deeply distrust this sort of statement because it seems to deny that history happens, although in fact there is no necessary opposition between structure and process.5 In later work Izard comments at length on the implausibility of the invasion stories and speculatively constructs more realistic ones that include more of what must have happened in fact. He envisages a much more complex interaction over time between “conquerors” and “autochthons” and embarks on a sustained and sympathetic interrogation of the traditions of the Mosse and their neighbors, including Dagbon, in search of the conditions of invention of nam as implied by the stories of Na Gbewaa and his sons.6 time and Space Instead of thinking of two kinds of people—passive, religious tindanas and their aboriginal followers on the one hand and a superior stock of belligerent, secular, political invaders on the other—we should recognize both as necessary components of a single social system in which locality and descent express the relationship between the spatial extension of society as a productive system (land) and its reproduction from generation to generation (descent). As Michael Jackson put it, “The complementary TINDANAS AND CHIEFS 71 principles of social organization which are variously called lineage/locality , kinship/residence, ancestors/Earth, descent/territoriality, can be abstractly and heuristically polarized as a distinction between temporal and spatial modes...