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

2. Drum Chant and the Political Uses of Tradition

2 This chapter traces the role of tradition in the politics of succession to the Nam of Yendi, the kingship of Dagbon. It necessarily focuses on chiefs, but the issue of nam, the essential quality of chieftaincy conferred by ritual, obtrudes from time to time. The ritual administration of nam is conducted by tindanas, a function described in chapter 4. The First Kingdom, from the mid-fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, is known to history almost entirely through oral tradition, especially drum chant. The Second Kingdom, from 1700 to 1900, is better known because, in addition to drum chant, we have other sources of information, some of them independent of events in Dagbon itself. Over the course of the twentieth century, drum chant and tradition in general took on new functions as “tradition” came to be the defining characteristic of a social system opposed to the “modern” and the “political” in Ghana.1 Dagbamba describe their tradition as the way of life that distinguishes them from other Ghanaians. Somewhat more narrowly, it is the story of the origin of that way of life in the creation of the kingdom of Dagbon and the institutions of chieftaincy by Na Nyagse and his descendants. Tradition (Dagboŋ kali) is embodied in at least three kinds of activity: the recitation of drum history, the performance of ceremony at chiefs’ courts, and the performance of sacrifices and other rituals at family, dynastic , and local shrines, the last being in the charge of tindanas (see the appendix and chapter 3). Although tradition itself distinguishes chiefs and tindanas as conquerors and aborigines, respectively, all three loci of tradition are elements of a single complex that Dagbamba speak of as essential to the continued moral and political integrity of Dagbon. Tradition as historical account is in the charge of drummer praisesingers (lunsi, s. luŋa, hereafter lunga), known elsewhere in West Africa Drum Chant and the Political Uses of tradition 36 CHIEFS, PRIESTS, AND PRAISE-SINGERS as griots. Drum chant, or praise-singing (salima), a form of epic poetry, together with the complex repertoire of rhythms and dances and the ceremonies of chieftaincy, is the primary art form, closely associated with Dagbamba identity. In performance on special occasions at the palace of an important chief it continues for hours. Phyllis Ferguson was present in 1970 at the maiden performance of a gifted lunga that went on for five hours without stopping, a remarkable feat.2 As political ideology it is compelling. Drummers are often described as the historians of Dagbon , but drum chant is not really history at all, though educated men with scholarly inclinations today follow the example of British scholars to draw from it history in the modern sense, complete with highly questionable dates stretching back to 1400 or even further. The received history of Dagbon, as one meets it in the writing or more often in the conversation of intellectuals, combines elements of drum chant with material derived from colonial anthropology and a limited number of publications that are themselves colonial products, whose contents have to some extent entered oral tradition. History as presented by tradition is politically salient at two levels. The myth of Na Nyagse supports the exclusive right of his descendants to govern and to control land, not only as territory but, in modern times, as a productive and saleable resource. As Ibrahim Mahama succinctly puts it, “The kingdoms can all list their kings from the beginning; the Konkomba can not, therefore they have no knowledge of the past on which to base their claims to land.”3 The story of events in the Second Kingdom, especially from about 1800 on, supports the current rights of chiefs, royal and commoner, as determined by the outcome of past struggles. In principle, tradition is single and true, but in fact it may be multiple and contested, as opposed factions invoke and manipulate different accounts of the past. This use of tradition is central to the conflict between the descendants and supporters of two sons of Na Yakubu (1832–1863), Na Abudulai (1863–1875) and Na Andani (1875–1899). As the twentieth century progressed, this conflict between “the Abudus” and “the Andanis” became more and more bitter and more productive of violence until in 2002 it resulted in the death of Ya Na Yakubu Andani and made Dagbon a byword for political disorder in Ghana. fig. 1 The late Ya Na Yakubu...