Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana (review)

Carola Lentz has written a scholarly work that is an important addition to the history of northern Ghana. Contemporary politics as well as the relatively short period of documented colonial and post-colonial history are recorded here in careful and extensive detail. She raises issues in her analysis which are fundamental to an understanding of society in this region of Ghana. The treatment of her theme raises questions as well. The north-western town of Wa has an ancient mosque and is a centre of Muslim culture unparalleled in the north-east. The first Christian mission established in northern Ghana was the Catholic Mission in Navrongo and this distinguishes north-west from north-east, where mission activity and its associated education arrived later. The north is little known to southern Ghanaians, who frequently assume that the region is simply an underdeveloped version of their own social world. This is relevant to the task Carola Lentz has undertaken, because the political history of Ghana as a nation state has been dominated by southerners, and the southerners' assumption of superiority with respect to the north is part of a wider context in which the creation of northern ethnic identities occurs.

One important point made by Lentz in the early chapters relates to indigenous notions of territory. Highly significant in the organization of north-western communities is the concept of 'first-comers' to a particular territory, who are contrasted with later arrivals. This is both a religious and political distinction: certain ritual powers over the earth are held by priests drawn from descendants of first-comers, who give permission to new arrivals to cultivate and build on land associated with the shrines of which the priests have custody. These 'earth shrines' were, according to Lentz (p. 20), 'perceived not as a flat homogeneous territory, but as a field of ritual powers . . . earth shrine borders were not imagined as linear boundaries but as a series of meeting points in the bush marked by hills, rivers, rocks, ponds or specific trees'. The boundaries of shrine land were and continue to be negotiable as population increases and moves through the area, opening new land for cultivation, and abandoning older land and settlements.

According to Lentz, residence in the same shrine land unites peoples of different languages and cultural backgrounds in solidarity vis-à-vis those of other regions. She sidesteps, however, the important political mechanisms of 'fission and fusion' within unilineal kin groups, and the role of feud in acephalous polities. When dealing in later chapters with 'ethnicity' and questions of what she terms 'cultural work', she hardly connects her material to Jack Goody's encyclopaedic study of the people with whom she is mostly concerned. Goody demonstrates how kinship systems, territory, and particularly significant artefacts may be combined to provide a flexible system of 'ethnic' identification. One wonders how these elements fare in the new order she is describing.

A large part of Lentz's study is, in fact, concerned with the names chosen to identify themselves by people of the north-east whose indigenous language and culture are developed from a clearly evident common root. Lentz illustrates the 'polysemic' nature of ethnic identities with the case of 'A member of the Kusiele patriclan from the village of Kokoligu . . . [who] would identify himself in Europe as an African or Ghanaian, in Accra as a northerner, in Tamale as an upper westerner, in Wa as a Dagaba/Dagara or a Nandome, in Nandom as a Kusiele or Kokoligule, and in Kokoligule as someone from the Zogpiele section and the house of Kuunyaa' (pp. 271-2). This 'nesting' of identities is not unusual in most nation states, but in this case, Wa, the Muslim centre, requires a contrasting identity which must be chosen from a group that prior to the colonial period had no single nomenclature to distinguish communities living in neighbouring spaces. This is the point at...