The Politics of Chieftaincy: authority and property in colonial Ghana, 1920–1950 by Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch (review)

Based on a 2008 doctoral thesis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Politics of Chieftaincy sets out to explore debates and contests over chiefly authority and landed property in Accra, the headquarters of the British colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The period under scrutiny is what might be called that of ‘high colonialism’: that is, the three decades falling between the early twentieth-century consolidation of British rule in the Gold Coast and its rapid dissolution following the spectacular rise of radical mass nationalism from the late 1940s. It was that nationalism which propelled Accra to the centre stage of the African liberation struggle, and when in 1957 the city became the capital of tropical Africa’s first independent nation state it came briefly to symbolize the possibilities of a new modernizing and sovereign urbanism on the continent. Despite this trajectory – and despite the fact that, after some tough decades, Accra has now restored its image as one of contemporary Africa’s most vibrant urban centres – surprisingly little is known about the city’s twentieth-century history. With this in mind, Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch looks back to Accra before the nationalist era, when its political life still revolved to a large extent around the institutions of its indigenous Ga inhabitants. Her analytical foci are the shifting dynamics of Ga chieftaincy, of landed wealth, and of the intersection between the two, and her goal is ‘to uncover actions, thoughts, and feelings of regular Africans and elites in the arena of property and political conflicts’ (p. 14).

The book opens with a useful survey of the various secular and sacred institutions governing the Ga town quarters or akutsei, which emerged in symbiotic relationship with three coastal trading forts – English, Dutch and Danish – and evolved throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into hybrid urban nodes linking the Atlantic economy with the hinterland of the Gold Coast. By the 1920s, Accra was expanding rapidly beyond these old seafront quarters as established townspeople moved into newly created suburbs, and as diverse migrants from the Gold Coast and beyond, attracted by the city’s role as a hub of the booming cocoa-based economy, poured into town. It was this urban growth that generated the contests over land, over customary law and over the meanings of Ga chieftaincy examined in the book’s subsequent chapters. Fundamentally, the commodification and escalating value of urban and periurban land – the ownership of which had hitherto been typically vague and ambiguous – fuelled fierce contests both between and within Ga families, quarters and townships. Many of these disputes were fought out in colonial courts, where prolonged and often mind-bogglingly complex cases generated intense interest as well as lucrative incomes for the city’s elite lawyers. At the same time, established Ga notions of chiefly and ritual office underwent a period of intense scrutiny and renegotiation – not just with regard to establishing precisely who controlled land, but also with regard to the tangled relationship between the Ga, the colonial state and new urban migrants. In short, Ga authorities inexorably lost control over the terms of settlement in the expanding colonial city, a loss of authority that contributed to a period of ferocious infighting and the ‘destoolment’ of many leading office holders.

Sackeyfio-Lenoch tells a complex story with considerable clarity, making good use of the extensive range of documentary sources generated by the destoolment, succession and land disputes that so dominated Accra’s interwar political arena. The rich colonial archive is supplemented by a selection of contemporary oral sources, although I must admit that I found the historical interpretations based on the latter sometimes less than convincing; the observation that ‘litigants employed particular versions of the past in ways that allowed them to contest relations of authority over land and people’ (p. 161) might usefully have shaped a more critical consideration of present...