Disguising Chiefs and God as History: Questions on the Acephalousness of Lodagaa Politics and Religion

International African Institute

Disguising Chiefs and God as History: Questions on the Acephalousness of Lodagaa Politics andReligionAuthor(s): Sean HawkinsSource: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 66, No. 2 (1996), pp. 202-247Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1161317 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 03:25

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cambridge University Press and International African Institute are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Africa: Journal of the International African Institute.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 03:25:18 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iai

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1161317?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Africa 66 (2), 1996

DISGUISING CHIEFS AND GOD AS HISTORY: QUESTIONS ON THE ACEPHALOUSNESS OF LODAGAA

POLITICS AND RELIGION

Sean Hawkins

Ever since the 1970s historians of colonial Africa have been particularly aware of the strong possibility that social and cultural practices could easily have been invented and their novelty readily disguised. Consequently, any notion of tradition has involved considerable historical ambiguity (MacGaf- fey, 1970; Henige, 1974; Dorward, 1974; Staniland, 1975; Iliffe, 1979). At about the same time some sociologists and anthropologists called into question the whole epistemological basis of the concept of tradition and argued that it was little more than a means of objectifying and distancing African societies (Bourdieu, 1977; Fabian, 1983). Historical studies have shown that, often as not, Africans invented traditions to legitimate practices to outsiders. Changes often masqueraded as traditions in order to exploit or adapt to colonial, and later post-colonial, circumstances. Indeed, the relationship between past practices and contemporary ones does not seem to have become problematic until the advent of the colonial era, when the notion of tradition conferred an otherwise unobtainable, and hitherto unnecessary, degree of legitimacy on African practices (Henige, 1974: 7, 104-5; Dorward, 1974: 463, 369; Staniland, 1975: 14, 189; Iliffe, 1979: 323, 337; Prins, 1980: 28-9).

Colonialism wrought changes of a scale and type hitherto unknown to most Africans, creating disjunctures and discontinuities which could be bridged only by reinterpreting the past. The psychological need to create a sense of continuity with the past in the face of unprecedented changes was both a product of history itself and a catalyst for the production of historical representations. Traditions were invented not only to legitimate changes but also to minimise the sense of temporal dislocation (Hobsbawm, 1983: 1, 4-5). Ranger has recently suggested that the term 'imagined' might be more appropriate to describe the production of some traditions, and this would apply particularly well to processes whereby the past was changed to accord with the present (Ranger, 1993a: 81). Discomfort with such dislocation presupposed the growth of historical consciousness of a particular variety, i.e. one bounded by discursive knowledge or logic instead of practical consciousness or myth (Feierman, 1990: 27-39; Heehs, 1994: 1-5). With the advent of colonisation the past, and particularly its relationship with the present, became important-indeed, problematic-in new ways.

African societies became victims of invented traditions only when the latter came to be accepted by succeeding generations unaware of their recent origin, when the act of invention became lost to the inventors, and, most important, when historicism, an 'excessive regard for the institutions and values of the past', made representations of the past more important than such considerations as relevance, practicality or efficacy.1 The resulting suppression of the otherness of the past, or the mutability of the past in terms



LODAGAA CHIEFS AND GOD

of the present, which has been documented by historians of colonial and post-colonial Africa, is at once fascinating and threatening to the historian. In this article two episodes of production are considered, one from the late 1920s and early 1930s, the other contemporary-one colonial, the other post-colonial. In both the past was reworked to fit the exigencies of the present. In the earlier case colonial administrators initiated the historical fiction of chieftaincy, while in the later case an indigenous clergy sought to change the structure of the religious past. From these two examples we acquire a strong sense not only of the mutability of the past but also of the limited value of historical reality in the face of the practical finessing of the past for definite political and religious purposes.2

The LoDagaa live on either side of the Black Volta in both Ghana and Burkina Faso.3 This article deals with those living to the east, primarily in what came to be known in the early years of this century as Lawra District (see Fig. 1). In the early 1930s the institution of chieftaincy was written into LoDagaa history by colonial administrators only two decades after they themselves had created that position. Colonial administrators created this historical fiction despite the strong views of a generation of earlier officers that there had been no chiefs prior to the arrival of the British. Chiefs were an imposed reality which the LoDagaa grudgingly accepted during the colonial era, but in the post-colonial period they became an internal feature of local politics and assumed a degree of practical legitimacy. Although succession disputes repeatedly pointed to the arbitrary origins of the position, most claimants retreated to arguments grounded in the past in order to support their claim to office, thereby repeating the fiction of the historical legitimacy of chiefs first put forward by administrators in the 1930s. Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s the indigenous clergy among the LoDagaa, who had taken over from their missionary predecessors in the 1960s, began to reassess the nature of god4 in indigenous religious thought in order to narrow the distance between LoDagaa culture and Catholicism. LoDagaa priests insisted on the existence of belief in and worship of a single, absolute deity which had been neglected by earlier missionaries and ethnographers. The latter had argued that there was only a diffuse or otiose notion of an absolute god in LoDagaa culture and thought. The once otiose god was repatriated, as if it had been exiled by earlier observers, in ways and circumstances similar to the intention of chieftaincy as an indigenous pre- colonial reality. However, the notion of the pre-missionary worship of god is as much a historical fiction as the idea of the existence of chiefs in the pre- colonial period. This article examines the two periods and argues that the similarities between them are due to historicist tendencies which were imposed from outside LoDagaa society.

FROM ANARCHY TO TYRANNY

From early fragmentary references to the LoDagaa and other acephalous peoples of what is today northern Ghana a series of stereotypes emerged at the end of the nineteenth century which endured well after the last colonial officer had departed just over half a century later. G. E. Ferguson, a native officer in Gold Coast colonial service, was despatched in 1894 to conclude

203




FIG. 1. Location of the LoDagaa in north-western Ghana.

treaties with the states and acephalous societies of the middle Volta basin. Among numerous 'barbarous tribes' he described the LoDagaa as incapable of 'negotiating with a European Power', owing to their bellicose nature and 'perfect nudity'. He concluded that they could 'only be civilised by force of arms' (Arhin, 1974: 99-100). The next report of any reliability came at the beginning of this century after the British had occupied the region they

204




called the Northern Territories. In 1905 Captain Moutray-Read conducted the first thorough reconnaissance of the district. In many respects he described the LoDagaa in a manner reminiscent of Ferguson's account of the 'barbarous' and 'savage' peoples whom the latter had summarily dismissed as incapable of political relations. Again, great emphasis was placed on the putative violence of the LoDagaa as well as the lack of any recognised authority beyond the 'family'.5

Toward the end of the nineteenth century marauding Sofa and Zaberma slave raiders had ravaged areas surrounding Lawra District, and on occasion these forces had impinged on the LoDagaa (Holden, 1965: 73-4; Hebert et al., 1975: 49-53; Person, 1975: 1706; Wilks, 1989: 125-6). The LoDagaa may also have been subject to raiding from Dagbon and Wa earlier in the century. Yet little or no attention was paid to the two generations of insecurity that the inhabitants of Lawra District had experienced prior to the arrival of the British, or to the fact that there was no indication that the spectre of external threats was over. Between 1903 and 1905 officers had made periodic and haphazard forays into Lawra District, appointing chiefs in the settlements they discovered. The criteria of selection were often simply those of having failed to flee at the approach of a British officer, supported by Hausa troops, and the ability to make the other inhabitants return.6

These stereotypes of the LoDagaa as primitive, anarchic and violent not only endured, but acted as retrospective justification of the colonial policy adopted between 1907 and 1932, during which 'sergeant-major' chiefs were imposed upon the LoDagaa. While admitting that abuses had occurred, one senior administrator, A. W. Cardinall, maintained that this era of rule through the chiefs had been necessary in order to impose peace.7 Similarly, a District Commissioner of Lawra remarked in 1931, by way of apologia for the effects of direct rule, 'it will scarcely be necessary to say that before the whiteman came there was in this part of the country no political authority whatsoever. Some kind of order had to be made, and thus it was that Chiefs were imposed upon the-people'.8

Chiefs had been created merely to act as channels of communication between officers and inhabitants. But once civil administration began they supplied labour for the administration. Until the 1930s the procurement of forced labour was perhaps the most significant activity of chiefs. During the early decades of colonial rule the administration demanded large amounts of labour: to create and maintain a road network, to build an extensive series of rest houses throughout the district, and to construct and expand administrative edifices in Lawra itself. Although this unpaid employment was never popular, the unofficial and heavier demands which some chiefs imposed upon their subjects were what really created antipathy toward the government. Until the mid-1920s officers remained largely ignorant of the extortionate amount of labour demanded by chiefs, or that the labour was put to work on land which had been expropriated from subjects by force. Such abuses were finally discovered by an exceptional officer, St John Eyre- Smith, who equated them with slavery, noting that they had led to a decrease in population due to 'hunger hindering the production of children and death' as well as forced migration.9

205




The period of direct rule, retrospectively justified as having brought 'peace', had merely established order: an order that was based on a silent violence of colonial tyranny carried out by the chiefs in the name of British rule. Before the advent of colonial rule external threats had periodically menaced the LoDagaa. The measures adopted by the colonial administration created a persistent internal menace. During this period there had been little attempt at any form of administration except the creation and maintenance of chiefs. Despite the transparent tyranny of many colonial appointees, rule through the chiefs continued without significant change until independence. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the revelations of the chiefs' abuses of power in Lawra District in the late 1920s was the administration's response. It was not the policy that was blamed, but the social conditions to which it had been applied. The Commissioner of the Northern Province argued that administration through the chiefs was an excellent policy among 'sophisticated people, but shown wanting when dealing with a very primitive people'.10 The Chief Commissioner of the Northern Territories, A. H. C. Walker-Leigh, argued in response that such abuses were a necessary defect of the system. Chiefs without such powers were not feared and, therefore, not obeyed.

The failures of direct rule were blamed on the social organisation of the LoDagaa, even though the administration had very little idea of what it actually was, it being virtually invisible to early colonial observers whose ethnographic expertise and sophistication of analysis did not reach beyond the ability to recognise and describe political hierarchies. Because they could not apprehend the ethnographic situation which confronted them, they mistook complexity for confusion. Eyre-Smith correctly identified the source of these abuses, but his persistent efforts to have the structure of administration altered in Lawra District so that it might better meet the needs of the people, rather than those of the administration, all fell on deaf ears. His first efforts had been restricted to recognising the elders. He argued that without the co-operation of elders it was impossible for the chiefs to rule without violence.12 Although this modest proposal was rejected, he made increasingly radical proposals over the next five years. They culminated in a report of 1933 which bitterly attacked those who regarded the imposition of chiefs as having been an excusable necessity. He argued that the British had imposed an autocracy in total ignorance of the existing social organisation of the LoDagaa, which had consisted of elders as well as a series of territorial priests responsible for local shrines, both of whom had provided 'very democratic land and religious organisation ... for centuries'.13

Beyond residential and descent groups which were led by elders, there existed territorial patterns of ritual co-operation and obligation centred on tengaan and tengaanble, major and minor Earth shrines. The frustration expressed by officers in their efforts to discover the locus of any area of settlement stemmed from the apparent absence of any distinguishing features. The shrines were so inconspicuous that, on the whole, officers were oblivious to their existence or importance. The Earth, as the source of all sustenance and the object of all labour, had a special relationship with the LoDagaa commensurate with its importance to their livelihood. Participation in sacrifices to these shrines dedicated to the Earth, either in thanks or in

206




expiation, created areas of ritual interdependence which had existed from time immemorial (Goody, 1956: 91, 1957; Some, 1969: 17-20). Within such areas the shedding of blood and theft were prohibited and violations could have resulted in banishment; any other transgressions of the edicts of the Earth, interpreted by the custodian of the shrine (tengaansob) and various diviners, required sacrificial expiation (Goody, 1957: 81).

The common feature of all LoDagaa social formations was the absence of political authority, which manifested itself in the radical autonomy of social forms from one another (Some, 1969: 20-1). All colonial descriptions of the LoDagaa perceived this autonomy as anarchy, as well as equating the absence of political authority or hierarchy with a primitive culture. The difficulty with LoDagaa social formations was that they did not cohere around any explicit ideology or language of representation. Referring to what he believed other officers regarded as his 'inconvenient discovery' of the tengaan, Eyre-Smith suggested in 1933 that the jurisdiction of colonial chiefs should be territorially redefined to correspond with indigenous areas of noumenal jurisdiction. Without such a readjustment the chiefs would remain free to exploit subjects who fell within their political jurisdiction but inhabited land belonging to a different tengaan.14 In the longer term he envisaged the incremental abolition of chieftaincy within Lawra District, by allowing positions to lapse following an incumbent's death.15 Finally, he articulated the central contradiction between the ideology of colonial rule and its practical application: 'The question is, are we to consider the interests of the chiefs we have set up or are we to consider the welfare of the people?'16 Needless to say, the status quo prevailed.

In 1935, only two years after Eyre-Smith's proposals, the chiefs he had envisaged abolishing were gazetted and granted exclusive exercise of judicial powers through Native Authority Courts. The period of direct rule had come to an official end in 1932, when indirect rule was officially implemented. As first conceived by Lugard in northern Nigeria, under this doctrine of administration power was to be exercised through indigenous institutions which had- been co-opted into the service of the empire. However, given the lack of any suitable indigenous institutions, there was little difference between the provisions of the two methods of rule in Lawra District. If anything changed it was merely that the positions of colonial chiefs were further institutionalised, giving them even greater official powers, while retaining their function as intermediaries between the administration (which became even less interventionist) and the people.17 The indigenous population still had not been accorded direct or 'traditional' representation.

INDIRECT RULE AND REWRITING THE PAST

From 1932 until the end of the Second World War the position of the chiefs, while modified, remained essentially unassailed. They assumed more and more of the administrative responsibilities which had formerly been the prerogative of the District Commissioner and, while they relaxed the extortion of their subjects, they maintained the unprecedented positions of wealth which by then complemented their official powers.18 Complaints

207




against the chiefs were even rarer than during the period of direct rule. Yet this is not to suggest that abuses of power had ceased. In part the chiefs became less flagrant and more ingenious. Until the end of the war the District Commissioners' diaries are full of incidents where it had been necessary to explain to the people the distinction between a legitimate and an illegitimate demand or order from the chiefs; a distinction which was prob- ably well understood by commoners, but difficult to make the chiefs accept.19

While there were no practical differences between direct rule and indirect rule, it would be a mistake to ignore the changes which the new policy engendered in the thinking of British officers. Various ordinances were enacted which were intended to regularise the position and powers of the chiefs in the hope that they would rule through law rather than coercion. In actuality these powers had already been relinquished to the chiefs through administrative neglect. Despite the undefined legal status of their jurisdiction, the chiefs had been levying fines and imposing punishments well before indirect rule was implemented, without regard to what might or might not have been possible on paper. They had been unintentionally assisted in this gradual accumulation of prerogatives by District Commissioners who had little understanding of what was really happening, and had only ambiguous and discretionary guidelines as to the intention of administrative policy. When indirect rule was established there was a strong impetus towards some form of codification in order to overcome the deficiencies which clearly stemmed from the total lack of any definition of chiefs' prerogatives.

In 1928, as indirect rule was being discussed, Cardinall had complained in an official report that none of the intelligence necessary to embark on a programme of greater native autonomy had been gathered during the period of direct rule.20 His report was an indictment of the results which had been obtained under direct rule, and although he was favourably disposed towards the introduction of indirect rule in principle, he could only agree with indirect rule in practice so long as adequate preparations were made before its application. Among the proposals he made was for a 'competent survey' to be undertaken by Captain R. S. Rattray, the Gold Coast government's anthropological officer.21 This resulted in the publication in 1932, on the eve of indirect rule, of a comprehensive two-volume ethnographic survey entitled The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland (Rattray, 1932). However, the professional competence of Rattray was deliberately disregarded in favour of the amateur misapprehension of untrained administrators. Throughout the British colonies of Africa there was disdain among administrators for the 'scientific' knowledge produced by anthropologists in favour of practical experience and political expediency (Kuklick, 1991: 189-90, 204, 217, 228). However, when knowledge clearly contradicted the ideology of indirect rule, it had to be ignored for a greater principle, that of colonial rule itself (p. 225). The primary concern of officers in Lawra District, as well as in the rest of the Northern Territories, was not to discover the ostensible customs of the people but to reconstruct social practices in a manner supportive of administrative structures. But they could not do so without imbuing their political engineering with a degree of legitimacy. In 1932 the Governor of the Gold Coast wrote to the Colonial Secretary that, with the collection of

208




ethnographic material by local officers, 'it soon became apparent that the obstacles to the establishment of native administration in certain, if not all, of the Divisions would not prove so difficult to surmount as had been asserted'.22

By 1932 there had been a shift in the orientation of administrators in Lawra and other districts which was more significant than any substantive change in policy. At the beginning of the period it had been claimed that the LoDagaa had no history, no political organisation and no laws. Thirty years later all these suddenly came into being in response to the perceived administrative need to provide justification for granting imperial power to colonially sanctioned courts. Earlier perceptions of the LoDagaa were rewritten, not from any new understanding, but to meet administrative requirements. Certainly changes had occurred in the intervening period, not least of which was the gradual evolution of colonial chiefs to a position of unprecedented political authority. Although the potential for reality-based administration had been greatly enhanced by the work of Rattray, the main factor which brought about this transformation was not increased understanding of the LoDagaa but the insistence that the prerequisites of the new type of administration must have once existed. Administrators preferred historical fiction to ethnographic facts. Cardinall's picture of conditions under direct rule had been challenged in 1931, by an acting Chief Commissioner who had just arrived in the north: 'It is impossible to imagine any independent African unit whose jurisdiction before the arrival of the European was so limited as Mr Cardinall suggests.'23

Against Cardinall's specific contention that judicial organisation had not existed among the acephalous peoples of the Northern Province, it was argued that it must have existed in the past and somehow fallen into abeyance at some intervening point in time. This view had little to do with any presumed knowledge of the pre-colonial past, proceeding instead from imaginative incapacity to accept that such conditions could have been anything but a historical anomaly. These contradictory presumptions were not unique to the administration of the acephalous societies of the Northern Territories. While colonial penetration among the Nuer of southern Sudan was a more gradual process, when the same shift in colonial policy was contemplated a similar form of historicism emerged in official attitudes (Johnson, 1986: 68). Conditions among societies such as the LoDagaa, which had none of the sense of collective identity of the Nuer, nor even any putative leaders, were even more extreme. But their immediate pre-colonial experience of disruption caused by slave raiding provided a convenient excuse for historical reconstructions to fulfil administrative imperatives.24

At the beginning of colonial rule 'traditional laws' had been thought to have been virtually absent. Moutray-Read had written that 'the natives themselves are extremely reticent and suspicious of giving any information about their customs, but own that they have no laws beyond those of the fetish'.25 Obvious difficulties of language and limited acquaintance influenced this view, but these were persistent problems for later administrators. They assumed that tradition must be the hidden dynamic of a society of that type, the invisible presence of all that was absent: laws, political organisation and history. Despite the creation of chiefs to administer

209




these ostensible categories of knowledge, the relationship between colonial structures and indigenous society was (and to a certain extent remains, in so far as the structures have survived) unresolved. The obvious means of resolving the nature of this relationship would have been the codification of this elusive 'tradition'. This was not possible during the period of direct rule owing to lack of ethnographic intelligence. Once the information became available at the outset of indirect rule, codification, while possible, was continually avoided as dangerous interference.26 The temptation was also resisted because such knowledge might have interfered with administrative exigencies. Ambiguity created administrative freedom.

More problematic than the status or content of 'native customary law' was the relationship of the chiefs and their courts with the indigenous social structure. Although the colonial administration created chiefs and invested them with unspecified, but nevertheless substantial powers, it could not provide them with indigenous authority or legitimacy. In urging a reassessment of the political structures which the administration had created and come to rely on so exclusively, Eyre-Smith had argued that it was necessary for the administration to recognise the knowledge and authority of the elders and tengaandem in order to keep the chiefs in check.27 This implicitly raised two important questions. Who, in an economically undifferentiated and politically unarticulated (as opposed to inarticulate) society, were the custodians, repositories and transmitters of traditional law? In 1931 the Chief Commissioner recommended the keeping of 'tribal books' by men of the 'tribe' as part of a campaign 'to re-invest the native rulers with their pristine authority', presumed to have been tarnished by the effects of direct rule, and 'to provide them with the wherewithal to maintain it'.28 This was just four years after Eyre-Smith had begun reporting copiously on the chiefs' abuse of their unprecedented powers.

While neither the custodians nor the arbiters of indigenous social practices, the chiefs had become the authorised translators of those practices from the various contexts of LoDagaa society to that of the colonial courts, or from a private, social domain to a public, political area. Administrative attitudes made the status of the Native Courts uncertain. Over time the inadequacies of this abdication of administrative functions to the chiefs became more apparent, especially as the external demands on the administration changed with the post-war momentum toward independence. In 1947 the District Commissioner of Lawra reported that the categorisation of disputes was haphazard and the record keeping inadequate, but that at present the chiefs presided over 'docile' subjects who did what they were told. 'However,' he warned, 'this happy state of affairs is not going to last, for litigants will question their decisions more and more vehemently as time goes on.'29 This was strikingly similar to criticisms made by Cardinall almost thirty years before.30 For the practical purpose of settling disputes LoDagaa litigants realised that the chiefs' justice was based on political fact, not historical legitimacy. Kojo Yelpaala noted that the LoDagaa had differentiated their own norms and practices from colonial authority, which was referred to as a system of ordir maintained bai forsi The use of loan words indicated that there were no indigenous equivalents to these forms of political authority in LoDagaa society (Yelpaala, 1983: 378).

210




The legitimacy of the courts depended neither on the correctness of their procedure nor on their ostensible status as repositories of custom, but on the sanctions that the administration afforded them. While they imitated the regalia of chiefs of other areas, with robes, fezzes for messengers, and wealth appropriate to their offices, the symbols which conferred authority and had political meaning remained government medallions.

POLITICAL REPRESENTATION AND HISTORICAL AMBIGUITY

It is difficult to delineate any clear or unique theme during the post-colonial period in Lawra District. The first generation of independence was a contradictory and confused era. Many, if not most, of the inconsistencies in colonial policy were perpetuated by national administrators. Indeed, if anything, developments after 1954 tended to mirror the first few decades of colonial rule, thereby undoing the tentative gestures made towards local government in the Northern Territories during the colonial withdrawal. Authority became more centralised, personnel were more remote, and at times the legitimacy of external, albeit national, governments became almost as questionable as it had been under colonial rule.

The period began with the sudden incorporation of the Northern Territories within a wider nation state in 1957, a prospect which alarmed many of its nascent political leaders (Ladouceur, 1979: 199-211). Continuity with the colonial past created contradictions, and the instability of national politics, with its chequered history of aborted governments, created confusion. At first the chiefs were troubled by the initial steps towards independence. The local council elections of 1952 threatened the colonial status quo. While the elective offices were administrative rather than political, this democratic development created some anxiety among the chiefs. At the same time as these elections were being contested news of the power of a miraculous shrine, called Naangminle, or 'the little god', reached Lawra District from the neighbouring French colony. It was reputed to purge supplicants and to afford them protection against their opponents, with the result that several chiefs hired lorries to take themselves and their followers to be imbued with its powers (Goody, 1975: 96-7). The two events were more than coincidental; the chiefs were in no greater need of mystical protection at this time than any other, but suddenly their exclusive monopoly of political power was 'threatened by the ballot, which could be seen as a possible instrument of retaliation in the hand of the aggrieved' (p. 98).

Although justified, these anxieties proved to be premature. In elections to political offices in 1954, 1956 and 1960 all the prominent candidates in both constituencies in Lawra District were the relatives of chiefs, with the exception of one who, having already succeeded his father, was already a chief himself. The opportunities which emerged offered little to the common people of Lawra District who were excluded from direct participation in these events by the near monopoly of educational opportunities that the relatives of chiefs had enjoyed and which provided the skills necessary to run for elected office. Political rivalry occurred between the chiefs as each attempted to ally his fiefdom with wider political interests outside the district.31 National politics created party divisions along the lines of local

211




competition between chiefs. The two successful local candidates in all three national elections were both members of the Northern People's Party, while their closest rivals were, by default as much as by political persuasion, supporters of the Convention People's Party.32 Until 1960 the position of chiefs remained virtually unscathed. While they had lost some administrative prerogatives, their judicial and political powers remained virtually intact. However, in that year legislation implemented by the CPP replaced the chiefs as court members with a single magistrate.33 The motivation for removing judicial powers from the chiefs at that particular time was political. Although magistrates were not answerable to the government, they were government-appointed.34 As Nkrumah and the CPP asserted greater control over local politics, their measures to curtail 'traditional' authority actually created political opportunities in areas such as Lawra District for the relatives and followers of those chiefs who supported the CPP because of the absence of alternative representatives. So pre-eminent were the positions which chiefs in Lawra District had attained over their commoner subjects, they were able to assume political roles at both regional and national level totally out of proportion to the size of the district (Ladouceur, 1979: 175-6; Staniland, 1975: 107). But because of the political rivalry between chiefs within the district, no political party was able to win exclusive control. This in turn led to much political interference by the CPP in what was, by the early 1960s, one of the few remaining areas of opposition within a one-party state.

The displacement of the chiefs from their official office reduced their position within the administration to titular and ceremonial roles. While the status of chieftaincy oscillated under different regimes, it never was reinvested with its former prerogatives. Although the chiefs lost much of their power in the post-colonial period, they came to acquire indigenous legitimacy as they were progressively denied external recognition. They were assisted in this transformation by the political instability of the post- colonial period, which prevented the emergence of popular democracy, and because the structure of political relations had changed irrevocably with the expansion in communications. Given the wider political contexts to which the LoDagaa were inextricably bound, it was impossible to go back to the conditions before the chiefs. So despite lack of official recognition, chiefs continued to hear cases informally in much the same way as they had before. They relied on the consent of the parties rather than government recognition.35

The origins of chieftaincy among the LoDagaa created a number of historical ambiguities and discontinuities in spite of popular acceptance of chieftaincy. The most important of these was what criteria should determine the selection or election of a chief. In September of 1984 a candidate tentatively vying for the position of Lawra Naa shot an elephant in Burkina Faso, on the other side of the Black Volta.36 Over several days his supporters transported the dismembered carcass to Lawra piece by piece with a variety of conveyances, but primarily bicycles. Hunks of flesh arrived wrapped in blood-sodden sacking, usually burlap, and were reconstructed in the courtyard of the candidate's compound. The skin was laid out, the feet and other prominent features were placed in their appropriate positions, and

212



LODAGAA CHIEFS AND GOD 213

Extemal agency Plaintiff Defendant

DC under direct rule Kyila c. 1905-?

DC under indirect rule Tandor?-1938 = Kuorikuol938-

[until early 1960s]

Convention People's Party Kpeng early 1960s-1966 -

National Liberation Council Kuorikuo 1966-1969 1 Babatuoronaa Kuorikuo

Second Republic [1974]

National Redemption Council

FIG. 2. Rival claims to the position of Zambo Naa in 1977.

the putrefying meat was heaped in the middle. Elephants had once existed in areas settled by the LoDagaa, but none had been seen recently on the eastern side of the Black Volta. Nevertheless, elephants still had a place within the symbolic language of the LoDagaa.37 The meat, a culinary rarity even in the pre-colonial past, was then distributed to the residents of Lawra. The gesture was meant to create continuity with the past, when great hunters had been honoured by their communities. Goody (1962: 81) noted that in the pre- colonial period the word naa, which was a cognate of the word for chief among the surrounding hierarchical societies, had only been used to refer to men who had become rich and powerful by virtue of farming or hunting.

However, the ambiguity of chieftaincy among the LoDagaa was political, not cultural. During a dispute over the succession to a sub-divisional chieftaincy in Zambo in 1977 the candidates did not resort to neo-traditional practices in order to establish a claim to the office of local chief but, instead, addressed the political machinations of the last three generations (see Fig. 2). In an official hearing the plaintiff, Kyila Kpeng, alleged that the new incumbent, Babatuoronaa Kuorikuo, had no 'traditional' right to the office. The defendant's father, Kuorikuo, had been appointed chief by the District Commissioner in 1938, following the removal of the plaintiff's paternal uncle, Tandor, because of embezzlement of Native Authority taxes. Kuorikuo had continued as chief until the early 1960s, when he was removed from office by the Convention People's Party's administrative representative, the District Commissioner. Referring to interference in local politics by the CPP in the early 1960s, Zame Karbo, the Lawra Regent, explained: 'At that time there was party politics and the place was full of troubles. At that time if you were not in support of the ruling party you had




trouble always.'38 Various other witnesses explained that this occurred after agitation in Zambo by propaganda secretaries of the CPP, who attempted to turn the people against Kuorikuo because of his support for the opposition Northern People's Party. Kpeng was then installed as Zambo Naa by the local administration following governmental approval and remained in office until 1966, when the National Liberation Council restored the defendant's father, who ruled until his death in 1969.39 The defendant had taken over as chief in 1970, but was not installed until 1974, by which time the NLC had been superseded by the Second Republic, which in turn had been overthrown by the National Redemption Council.

The main issue in the dispute was by what authority a chief was legitimated: colonial history, national politics, or the people. Kpeng and his supporters had argued that Kyila had been the first chief of Zambo, and therefore any successor had to descend from the same clan. But, cross- examining one of Kpeng's witnesses, the defendant managed to establish that Kyila had been forced upon the people.

How come it [was] that Kyila was appointed by a non-inhabitant and the people accepted? A. This was because in the past nobody could challenge the word of the whiteman. Q. In this [way] it was due to fear that Zambo people accepted Kyila as Zambo Naa? A. Yes, it was due to fear of the whiteman.40

Conversely, Babatuoronaa and his supporters had relied on the restoration of Kuorikuo by the NLC as the basis of the former's right to the succession. But Kpeng was able to demonstrate the limitations of this reasoning by pointing out that, just as he had been appointed chief by one regime and the defendant's father had been restored by another, they were now under yet another regime and, therefore, the question had to be reconsidered once again because legitimacy ultimately depended on external recognition.41 Because of the vagaries of their political fortunes, the authority of individual chiefs was repeatedly brought into question. While colonial authority was never seriously questioned, national authority was repeatedly demonstrated to be vulnerable and reversible.42

Following the death of Naa Polkuu of Nandom in 1984 a very similar succession dispute emerged. In an analysis of those events, Lentz summarised the issues in terms very similar to those which had emerged in Zambo in the 1970s.

Vehement debate ensued not only from the question who would be a legitimate and suitable successor for the late chief, but also from opposite views as to which procedure of decision-making was to be considered the correct one warranted by 'tradition'. [Lentz, 1993: 178]

Here again all sides had to go back to the arrival of the British and the creation of colonial chiefs, attempting to legitimate different successions by reading them back into the past, even though it was clear that colonial and post-colonial states had assumed an active and interventionist role43 (Lentz, 1993: 180, 191, 198). While candidates needed to win the political favour of the national government, they also needed to disguise political interference. Tradition was continually contested in the political history of chieftaincy in

214




Nandom. Lentz concluded that, despite conflicting appeals to an unambig- uous past, 'there is not one single, straightforward tradition and for that matter history to which the disputants could turn for arbitration' (1993: 211).

Many LoDagaa saw chieftaincy as having been founded on little more than 'fear of the whiteman' and individual chiefs supported by little more than the shifting vagaries of national government. And yet this historical knowledge did not create a movement against chieftaincy.44 What preserved chieftaincy among the LoDagaa was not arguments over its putative historical legitimacy but the realisation of the relevance of such forms of political organisation in the face of wider communications.45

In the Zambo chieftaincy dispute the parties all used different versions of the past: each different in terms of its depth rather than in terms of its substantive detail. Issues of precedence were clearly important in legitimating rival claims. But as Kyila Kpeng's witness demonstrated, if one went far enough back in time there were no precedents. Today the chiefs of Lawra District still use the symbols which their predecessors borrowed from neighbouring societies to mark their status. There is a readily observable set of chiefly 'traditions'. While this may seem like a historical charade, it is far less contradictory when looked at from a spatial rather than a temporal perspective. In their analysis of change in colonial Africa, Godfrey and Monica Wilson postulated that the most important factor was the expansion in the scale of all forms of life. While many of their arguments seem clearly outdated, they did point out the importance of changes in the scale of society and politics to historical consciousness: 'Expansion in historical scale does not imply cutting adrift from the past ... but it does imply a relative freedom from the immediate and parochial past' (Wilson and Wilson, 1945: 97, 163). This freedom was veridical rather than functional, as we can see in the Zambo dispute and as Lentz argued in her examination of the Nandom dispute. But the important point is that the disputants were forced to make representations of the past because history had become the primary language of political legitimacy.46

The imposition of a wider scale of political, social and economic relations, with the colonial chiefs at the centre of this system, exposure to the political traditions of neighbouring states, and the eventual emergence of an indigenous need for representation of parochial concerns at regional and national levels, have meant that chieftaincy has acquired a spatial relevance far greater than any temporal legitimacy. A usable past is not necessarily temporally accurate, but it is spatially appropriate. The use of the past to legitimate the present is a legacy of the British, as the administrative debate over chieftaincy during the late 1920s and early 1930s demonstrates. This invented history enabled the British to ignore the fact that there was nothing legitimate about the power of chiefs among the LoDagaa, and by implication nothing legitimate about their own power, which was exercised primarily through the chiefs. However, what made such inventions work, i.e. what made them both possible and acceptable, was that the scale of experience had changed.

A local historian, G. Tuurey, writing in 1982 on the absence of chieftaincy among the LoDagaa before the arrival of the British, commented that it was a 'pity' that the LoDagaa had not created chieftaincy themselves, as they had

215




therefore remained weak and disunited as a group. What observers such as Eyre-Smith had romanticised as a radical form of decentralised democracy was 'deplored' as at best a historical embarrassment: 'This was not political freedom, it was something worst [sic] than that. At best, it could be virtually described as political anarchy' (Tuurey, 1982: 36, 49). These words are extremely reminiscent of those of Ferguson and Moutray-Read over three- quarters of a century before. But, unlike those earlier observers, Tuurey was writing from the perspective of a society which was partially integrated into a large, bureaucratic state. The statelessness, or acephalousness, of the LoDagaa was far more difficult to defend in the 1980s than it would have been at the turn of the century, when the LoDagaa were very much isolated from surrounding political entities. Integration, partial or otherwise, imposed comparison. In an attempt to overcome some of these limitations, associated with the pre-colonial past, Tuurey set out to document as many instances of chiefly or royal authority as possible. He identified several states among the LoDagaa, comparing them with the political situation in Germany before nineteenth-century unification, with the difference that these fragmentary LoDagaa states were not confederated.47

The spectre of a chiefly pre-colonial past was raised a year later by another indigenous scholar, not to legitimate existing political arrangements but to defend the cultural past of the LoDagaa against the negative implications of statelessness. Kojo Yelpaala, a LoDagaa law professor teaching in the United States, argued that the reported statelessness of the LoDagaa ignored the internal potential for political hierarchy. Beginning with a rejection of the evolutionary assumptions of political typologies, then criticising the arbitrariness of definitions of the state, and, finally, questioning the basis of the dichotomy between political formations, Yelpaala suggested that it was only certain forms of political authority- namely 'the highly centralized hierarchical state'-which were absent from LoDagaa society at the turn of the century (Yelpaala, 1983: 357). Having defined stateless societies as 'actually species of states with various degrees of decentralization or concentration of political power', he suggested that a cyclical model of political structure was more appropriate to an understanding of political history in Africa than evolutionary paradigms (1983: 352-7, 363). Within this cyclical model any political formation possessed the potential to become a state. On the basis of this model, as well as 'limited publicized oral tradition', he asserted that 'there is sufficient information to come to the conclusion that sometime before the coming of the white man [the LoDagaa] must have experienced some centralization of political power'.48 He pointed out the existence of the word naa, meaning either 'chief' or 'rich person', as possible evidence of conceptual familiarity with central authority, arguing that the notion of naa was prevalent in certain stories of the LoDagaa, where he played the role of lawgiver, and that there was no similar role for the tengaansob, 'suggesting that the institution of tendaana may be relatively new in the history of the Dagaaba' (Yelpaala, 1983: 362). There is absolutely no reason to doubt the antiquity or the ubiquity of the institution of earth priest throughout the Voltaic region. This is palpably absurd.49 How does one explain the fact that there is no extant

216




evidence of any institutionalisation of political office among the LoDagaa? Indeed, one of Rattray's informants told him at the end of the 1920s:

Formerly we did not know anything about Chiefs, we did not use the word Na.... In olden times any man who had many sons commanded respect.... When the Europeans came, these were the men who came forward to meet them with a white fowl, while the Tengsob ran away. They (i.e. the former) became the white man's Chiefs. [Rattray, 1932: 429]

What Yelpaala ignored was the secularization of political authority which British rule wrought, and instead he attempted to square the past with the present rather than the present with the past as Eyre-Smith had vainly attempted.

The arguments of Tuurey and Yelpaala were elicited because of the situation of LoDagaa society and culture within a wider world. These and similar views are bound to influence future chieftaincy disputes. What is so interesting about these observers, as well as their colonial precursors, is that, although they were literate, they were heavily influenced by a sense of historicism which has caused them to finesse the past. These pressures have not affected oral discourses. From Rattray's informants of the 1920s to the witnesses in the Zambo dispute in the 1970s, there was clear recognition that chieftaincy was a fiction. But Tuurey and Yelpaala were not acting out of administrative convenience; they were responding to Western discourses which marginalised the LoDagaa. They did not criticise the assumptions of that discourse, just as the witness in the Zambo chieftaincy dispute did not challenge the right of the state to determine who was chief. This brings us to a very similar development in African theology over the last few decades: the insistence on the existence of an immediate, singular, absolute god as a means of defending African religion against the negative stereotypes of Western theology.

INCULTURATION AND THE NATURE OF GOD

Indirect rule, because of its use of the past as a source of legitimacy, established a legacy of historicism which diverted the LoDagaa in the post- colonial period from political action to historical representations. The adherence to history not only paralysed the capacity for change, it also bequeathed ambiguities and contradictions evident in contemporary attitudes toward the position of chiefs as well as the nature of pre-colonial political structures. The doctrine of inculturation which was articulated in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), although it is possible to find intimations of such an idea much earlier in the century, created a similar set of pressures.50 Since 1960, when the missionaries handed over religious authority to the indigenous clergy, Catholic leaders among the LoDagaa have been attracted by inculturation. Most of the changes which were initiated in the first few decades were liturgical in nature rather than theological: they included the use of Dagaare (the language of the LoDagaa), indigenous colour symbolism, aspects of local funeral ceremonies,

217




traditional lamentations, xylophones, drums, and songs (Kpiebaya, 1976: 493-8; Naameh, 1986: 291).

Suddenly, however, knowledge of indigenous cultures was important. In 1974 the Symposium of Bishops of Africa and Madagascar called for research into African cultures in order to provide solutions to the problems of evangelisation (Shorter, 1988: 211). This new requirement of LoDagaa practices was very similar to the needs which indirect rule imposed upon the colonial administration. Just as in the 1930s colonial officers had been called upon to discover the nature of pre-colonial LoDagaa politics over a generation after those structures and ideas had been superseded by colonial notions and designs, indigenous Catholic priests were called upon to investigate the religious nature of their own culture after a generation of missionary evangelism, and to seek ways of integrating Catholicism within LoDagaa culture. As with indirect rule, inculturation was a slow process. To begin with, it required 'serious research into the customs and religious values of the Dagara people', in much the same way as indirect rule initiated a period of ethnographic enquiry (Naameh, 1986: 290). In order for priests to take advantage of the new evangelical possibilities, they needed to finesse the past in order to represent indigenous culture as a series of practices and beliefs which ultimately worshipped the same unique and absolute god the missionaries had brought with them. The nature of god in indigenous religious thought was reassessed during the 1970s and 1980s in order to narrow the distance between LoDagaa culture and Catholicism.

Given that the missionaries were the only literate sources on what the LoDagaa had once believed, the project was problematic. Early converts had been told by the missionaries to reject their own culture.51 Attempts by priests to come to terms with the indigenous necessitated a reassessment of the past in order to legitimate the present. It was not sufficient to make representations about what the LoDagaa believed in the 1970s and 1980s; instead it was necessary to historicise those beliefs, and to argue that what the LoDagaa believed in the post-colonial period was what they had believed before the missionaries arrived. Therefore, discovering indigenous culture was both an ethnographic and a historical undertaking. It was not so much the nature of non-Christian culture which was important as the nature of pre- Christian LoDagaa beliefs and practices. In order to gain access to their own culture indigenous priests had to deal with the legacy of missionary views which had mediated their relationship with non-Christian beliefs. It was necessary to go back in time and re-examine the representations of their missionary predecessors in order to claim that any new representations had historical legitimacy. Two of the most important voices in this undertaking were those of Benedict Der, an academic historian, and of Father Paul Bekye, a Catholic priest. Both strove to redefine and reinterpret indigenous culture in order to permit fuller and more thorough moves by the Church toward inculturation. The question of the difference between the indigenous concept of god and its Christian variant was central to the work of both men.

In 1932 one of the most remarkable mass conversions in the history of evangelical Christianity in Africa took place among the LoDagaa. Ultimately, the reaction elicited by a small band of missionaries say more about the nature of the first generation of colonial rule, as well as pre-

218




existing existential concerns of the LoDagaa, than it does about the relative merits of Christian doctrine (Hawkins, forthcoming). Nevertheless, these events served to articulate representations of what the LoDagaa believed. Until that time their religious ideas had been ignored or presumed to be non- existent. As a result of exchanges between the LoDagaa and the missionaries, the latter maintained that there were strong differences between indigenous representations of god and their own conception of God.52 The question of whether the LoDagaa had chiefs is similar in several respects to the question of whether they had an active high god. In 1929 the White Fathers, or the Society of Missionaries of Africa, established a mission at Jirapa in Lawra District after two Catholic officers, Eyre-Smith and Cardinall, had suggested that they extend their work to the west from their station at Navrongo in the east, where they had enjoyed only modest success. Here too success was modest, but in 1932 the rains failed to arrive and the area was threatened with drought. Sacrifices were made to the local tengaan and a variety of other remedies were resorted to, but without success. Several of the recent converts from a neighbouring settlement led a delegation of non-converts to the missionaries for assistance. The Superior of the mission, Regimius McCoy, accommodated the delegation by conducting prayers. By a remarkable coincidence, there was a heavy downpour almost immediately after the service as the participants began to disperse. Following this extraordinary incident, delegations from settlements outside Jirapa, and from as far away as the neighbouring French colony (which was similarly affected), began arriving in Jirapa, to be informed by McCoy that they could not expect rain if they continued to sacrifice to indigenous shrines. 53 By the end of 1932 the missionaries claimed several thousand converts in the region, almost all of them having been gained in the last six months of that year. Fifteen years later the White Fathers laid claim to almost a quarter of all LoDagaa 'souls' in Lawra District.54

When the White Fathers had urged those LoDagaa who congregated around the mission to abandon their shrines and attendant sacrifices, they did not ask them to do so in the name of any new god, but in that of their own god. This deity was apparently called Naangmin, an otiose entity with whom the LoDagaa did not ever attempt to communicate, according to missionary intelligence. The missionaries explained that it was Naangmin who wished the LoDagaa to convert.55 For the missionaries it was a question of a power struggle between their God on the one hand and the ancestors, various lesser deities (ngmin), and spirits of the LoDagaa on the other. Writing over fifty years later, in his memoirs McCoy described this encounter in starkly religious terms. Although elders with whom he had spoken had been willing to admit to the existence of an absolute god, they considered attempts to solicit its aid futile. One member of the delegation was reported as having said, 'He is too big to be concerned about us.'56 To this McCoy apparently responded, 'That is where you are wrong and where your witch doctors and fetishists have led you astray. God knows each and every one of you and loves you' (McCoy, 1988: 114). When asked why this beneficent deity had then postponed the rain, the delegation was told it was because they had asked the spirits instead of God. 'If God had intervened, you would have thought it was the spirits who were answering you and you would have

219




continued to believe in their power and to lie in slavery to them' (McCoy, 1988: 113-14). The indigenous god, remote, inaccessible, and uncaring, was apparently quite distinct from the immediate, accessible, and caring, albeit jealous, God on offer from the missionaries. But beyond having identified and characterised a supreme god among the LoDagaa the missionaries did not have a very sophisticated understanding of indigenous religious beliefs.57 In part this was because they did not have enough time for such studies in their initial years, and later, after the mass conversion, because such an understanding was not necessary. (Der, 1980: 178). However, among the Kasena to the east, where missionary success had proved more recalcitrant, several studies had been made of the indigenous systems of noumenal beliefs prior to the arrival of missionaries in Jirapa. These studies were relatively sympathetic and accommodating.

Perhaps as a result of their success, the missionaries at Jirapa were quick to adopt an extremely disparaging attitude toward indigenous beliefs. In an early missionary account of the 'customs and religion' of the LoDagaa, entitled 'Concerning the useless things of the Dagaaba', all aspects of indigenous culture which were unacceptable to the missionaries, which was almost everything except for Naangmin, were deemed bu-wiir ('useless- things') and those who adhered to these aspects of their own culture were deemed bu-wiir puorbe ('those-who-pray-to-the-useless-things', a term which later entered common usage among Catholics to refer to non- Christians (Naameh, 1986: 243; Bekye, 1991: 276). In the 1980s the indigenous clergy took offence at this characterisation of pagan practices and beliefs. Kuukure, a colleague of Bekye and another proponent of a theocentric interpretation of LoDagaa culture, argued that 'God' was worshipped in sacrifices.

It can be said that most sacrifices are offered in veneration of the spirits, not to the spirits as final objects, despite some ambiguity that often hangs over the act. Thus viewed one can understand that rightful dismay and indignation of non-Christian Dagaaba when they hear themselves referred to as Ngmin-be-puorbe (non- worshippers of God). [Kuukure, 1985: 106]

Since the 1970s several LoDagaa historians and theologians have argued that the connection between Naangmin and Jehovah, observed by their missionary predecessors among the Kasena, provided the basis for resurrecting much of that discarded and discredited culture once deemed bu-wiir. The immediate problem which indigenous priests encountered was that they were, after years of intensive religious instruction, quite distant from the culture of their own parishioners. Overcoming the negative attitudes of their missionary predecessors was not difficult, but understanding what had preceded their arrival was more problematic, yet crucial to resurrecting indigenous religious beliefs and practices while at the same time revitalising Catholicism among the LoDagaa. The studies of missionaries within the various dioceses of the north-west were not utilised. Instead, the more sympathetic studies which the White Fathers had conducted among societies in the north-east of Ghana, such as the Kasena, were examined. According to Der, who had grown up a Catholic, these earlier studies clearly

220




indicated that cultures very similar to that of the LoDagaa, all within the complex of Voltaic societies, 'indirectly' approached God through the ancestors, as well as 'implicitly' through other rituals. In an article published in 1980 he strongly criticised the work of Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody, largely because of their description of god, among the Tallensi and LoDagaa respectively, as a remote and distant entity within the relative religious systems (1980: 172). In a work published in 1991 Father Paul Bekye continued this line of criticism, extending Der's criticisms to the early missionaries (1991: 279-81, 285). In particular, he took exception to McCoy's criticisms of indigenous beliefs, especially the exaggeration of their deficiencies, such as the lack of awareness of god, going so far as to refer to some of them as a complete misrepresentations.58 Both Der and Bekye maintained that the indigenous conception of god was equivalent to, and commensurate with, the idea of God which the missionaries brought with them. Der was concerned with establishing that the LoDagaa had always sacrificed directly to god, albeit through intermediaries, while Bekye set out to understand 'God's self-manifestation in traditional religions' and 'to establish the status of traditional religion, such as the [LoDagaa's], as a legitimate means of God's self-revelation, and also as a valid channel of God's salvific grace' (Bekye, 1991: 226, 314). It was crucial to these mediumistic interpretations that evangelisation had been entirely commensurate with indigenous beliefs and that it had not resulted in any significant changes in indigenous beliefs; or, to put it another way, to prove that the recognition of Naangmin's uniqueness had not come after the arrival of the missionaries.

There is no doubt that missionaries at Navrongo such as Bishop Morin, who arrived in the first decade of this century, quickly discovered a notion of a supreme being among cultures such as that of the Kasena and thus those cultures appear to have differed little from that of the LoDagaa.59 The main difference was that missionaries to the east argued that the lesser spirits were agencies through which the people approached God. Justin Ukpong has identified this as a 'mediumistic theory' of indigenous religion, citing Morin as the first West African Catholic missionary to put forward such an interpretation (1983: 194). This mediumistic interpretation was first applied to the LoDagaa by Father Girault at the end of the 1950s (Girault, 1959). According to Girault, the LoDagaa did not have a particularly coherent or clearly articulated religious system. This observation was made by subsequent observers, who also stressed the oral nature of knowledge, the different categorisations of experience, and the unreasonable expectations of inquisitors (Goody, 1972: 14; Ukpong, 1983: 192). Girault attempted to increase his authority as an observer by undermining the capacity of indigenous people to understand their own culture. Describing the state of indigenous religious knowledge, he argued that because of frequent migrations prior to colonial rule the LoDagaa had forgotten the ultimate significance of many of their practices (1959: 331). This permitted him to impose a theocentric interpretation on religious practices. A similar type of argument was employed by Kuukure in the 1980s. He argued that god was the ultimate recipient of all LoDagaa sacrifices, 'although the reality of the intermediaries is often so heavy as to obscure this fact and make God appear

221




only as an indirect beneficiary' (1985: 91). As Ubah (1982: 92) has noted, this is the real problem with mediumistic interpretations: they are interested in a transcendent reality beyond the consciousness of believers.

While the White Fathers working in and around the Kasena tended to search for similarities and points of identification between the indigenous system of beliefs and their own theological vision, the missionaries who worked among the LoDagaa before Girault in the 1950s had actually found few points of comparison. McCoy understood Naangmin in very different terms from the God he offered the LoDagaa. It was a view which subscribed firmly to the idea of a remote god, or what has come to be called the 'deus otiosus theory' (Ukpong, 1983: 188; Eliade, 1963: 121-7). Der argued that the missionaries among the LoDagaa left little in the way of written accounts of the indigenous religion because of the remarkably swift reaction to their presence. While this is true, it does not mean that their views were not clear. McCoy and others strongly attacked the ancestors, spirits and lesser gods, seeing them not as mediums to god but as superstitions leading the LoDagaa away from god by subjecting the LoDagaa to 'constant fear'60 (McCoy, 1988: 129). Even contemporary members of the indigenous clergy who endorse a mediumistic interpretation have repeated these earlier attacks on the lesser agencies of LoDagaa religious thought. 'The apparently transparent belief in God co-existed with an almost morbid fear and preoccupation with the spiritual agencies and the occult mystical powers' (Bekye, 1991: 294).

IDENTIFICATION OR ADAPTATION?

What revisionists such as Der and Bekye ignored was that belief in an absolute god was not synonymous with a direct relationship with that god. As both Horton and Ukpong have noted, reinterpreting indigenous cosmologies in such a hierarchical perspective does violence to the integrity and intellectual coherence of those religious beliefs (Horton, 1993b: 161-93; Ukpong, 1983: 196-8). The mediumistic theory was used not only to narrow the distance between indigenous religious beliefs, but also to explain the conversion of so many LoDagaa in the 1930s. Goody, for example, dismissed the concept of conversion as misleading, and suggested that a more appropriate description of such a phenomenon among the LoDagaa was 'identification' (Goody, 1975: 102-5). While describing the LoDagaa concept of god as essentially otiose, he argued that the facility with which the LoDagaa identified with the God of a foreign religion was 'indicative of the possibility that such a shift can take place not only between religions, as in conversion, but also within religions' (p. 103). Accordingly, belief in god among cultures such as that of the LoDagaa could have oscillated between active and otiose characterisations of god. This postulated internal religious change would have resulted from shifting solutions to the problem of evil: dissatisfaction with lesser agencies having resulted in attempts at commu- nion with god, thereby causing a reconceptualisation of god as an active rather than an otiose force, until appeals to god failed to avert evil and god regained an otiose status in order to deny god's responsibility for misfortune (Goody, 1972: 32).

222




Other observers have also argued that the conversion process among the LoDagaa was essentially a matter of identification. This is the implication of all mediumistic interpretations. One indigenous linguist, while admitting to the notion of a remote god among the LoDagaa, denied that this was 'synonyme de la meconnaissance par les Dagara d'un Dieu supreme.... La solide reconnaissance d'un Dieu absolu s'est avere une base importante qui a favorise l'eclosion de la foi et provoque la conversion de ce peuple a la religion catholique' (Some, 1992: 40). There is no doubt that the remoteness of Naangmin was an important theological device for accounting for evil among the LoDagaa and other African societies. However, Ukpong has argued that the fact that many West African religions explained evil in such terms makes mediumistic interpretations potentially offensive:

among most West African peoples God is regarded as supremely good and cannot be thought of as author of evil. Among these peoples calamities like epidemics or famine are attributed to the gods, and sacrifices are offered to these gods to placate them. To say that such sacrifices are ultimately intended for God would mean saying that God is the cause of the epidemic or famine, and this is repugnant to these peoples' conception of God. [Ukpong, 1983: 198]

The suggestion that Naangmin might be held accountable for misfortune, of suddenly becoming an active agent, was denied by Naameh, a dissenting Catholic historian. Accordingly, he argued that, although the LoDagaa were attracted to the mission by God's apparent revelation, which, following missionary rhetoric, identified Naangmin with God, they did not see God as an active agent (Naameh, 1986: 199). Similarly, Kusiele noted that among the LoDagaa of Burkina Faso in the 1970s affliction was still not attributed to god (1973: 44).

Goody has based his analysis on the emergence of the cult of Naangminle, or 'little god', which swept through the area inhabited by the LoDagaa in 1952, resulting in mass pilgrimage, 'confession', the abandonment of 'wrongfully acquired property', and observation of specific prohibitions:

The LoDagaa say you cannot kill a fowl to God; he has no altar and there is no way of communicating with him. But in the Na-angminle cult, they did kill fowl and make material objects (e.g. bangles) associated with the shrine. [Goody, 1975: 103]

Significantly, Goody's collaborator, Gandah, did not see Naangminle as a refraction of god, but as a separate deity subordinate to god (Goody, 1972: 15). The fact that this movement came only twenty years after the rain incident and the arrival of God, not to mention half a century of social, political, and economic change, would suggest that the movement was the result of 'syncretistic tendencies', but Goody rejected such an interpretation, as it implied that LoDagaa religion was 'a static phenomenon and attributed the dynamic elements in the religious system to contact with the outside' (Goody, 1975: 103). Writing in the 1970s, Goody appears to have been unduly influenced by concern over questions of native agency, but, even if the impetus to change had come from outside, the architects and agents of that change were still the LoDagaa.61 This model of internal religious change

223




is very reminiscent of Yelpaala's arguments, which it preceded, concerning the immanence of a state within the political structure of the LoDagaa. As with the evidence for accepting the immanence of a state among the LoDagaa, this theory of the shifting nature of god becomes difficult to accept in the face of the near absence of rituals, liturgy, shrines, cults, or priests dedicated to god which has been reported throughout this century among the LoDagaa and other Voltaic peoples.

Precisely why the LoDagaa converted in such large numbers at that time cannot be ascertained from available studies because studies have placed more importance on underlying structural factors which may have facilitated conversion than on specific historical conditions or cultural motivations. As a result, secondary factors have been given prominence over primary causes. Most significantly, the effects of medicine, which was the primary instrument the missionaries used to draw followers to the mission and to retain them after the rain incident, have been ignored entirely (Hawkins, forthcoming). If there was any one factor which would have facilitated this movement from a religion based on a loosely articulated set of noumenal agencies to the acceptance of a single, absolute deity, it must have been the social change which preceded the arrival of the missionaries. The political 'pacification' of the LoDagaa greatly expanded freedom and security of movement and communications within the region. The marginalisation of the separate and independent tengaansob, and their displacement by a hierarchical and secular system of political office, greatly expanded political as well as social horizons. And, finally, the wide-scale pattern of labour migration which developed quickly after British occupation created a wider consciousness of the world beyond than had been possible during the pre- colonial period. These created a new sense of cultural, social, political, economic and religious spaces.

The highly fragmented patterns of the pre-colonial period were displaced by homogenising and expansionist pressures. The disintegrating microcosm of most people's lives was gradually and incompletely displaced by a macrocosm of new colonial realities when the missionaries arrived.62 Under these circumstances, Horton has argued, indigenous cosmologies are susceptible to re-articulation and elaboration (1971: 101-4). The arrival of the missionaries may be interpreted as yet another catalyst in this process of expanding boundaries. Similarly, the spread of Naangminle should be seen in this light of expanding boundaries. As Horton suggested, 'the beliefs and practices of the so-called worldly religions are only accepted where they happen to coincide with responses of the traditional cosmology to other, non- missionary, factors of the modern situation' (p. 104). This model is quite distinct from Goody's internal cycle of religious speculation and change, for here there are clear reasons why change was necessary.

Several studies, written after the mid-1970s, have put forward similar arguments to those of Goody concerning the predisposition to religious change among the LoDagaa. These have been less interested in the issue of native agency than in establishing a dialogue between LoDagaa and Catholic cultures. Whereas Goody sought to deny the external agency in the conversion process, later studies have merely sought to minimise the importance of that agency in order to maintain the commensurability of

224




external ideas with indigenous, pre-missionary beliefs. Both Der and Bekye argued that conversion did not involve a major structural change, and that Christianity did not significantly change LoDagaa culture. Der argued that because of the commensurability between indigenous beliefs and Catholic faith (based on the alleged indigenous worship of god and the correspondence between ancestors and saints) there was no radical disjuncture. While documenting the extent of social and political upheaval caused by the growth of Christianity, Der argued that the missionaries distinguished between secular and religious practices, and forbade only those which violated the supremacy of god, these being any practices which involved sacrifice or divination (1983: 226-9, 234). Given the importance of both practices to forms of healing among the LoDagaa, these limitations were profound. But the distinction between the missionaries' rejection of sacrifice and the objects of that sacrifice is quite spurious, as it was sacrifice which imparted meaning to noumenal agencies and indeed made them relevant. Without sacrifice they were purposeless.

This argument concerning not only the commensurability, but also the direct correspondence, of LoDagaa beliefs with Catholicism was taken further by Bekye.

One would therefore be right to say that this fact of the people being able to identify themselves, through a correspondence of parallel religious themes and concepts [especially Naangmin = God], in the drama of salvation history that involved humanity as a whole, was a factor of enormous importance that quickened their grasp of, and their ready response to, the message of salvation that was being addressed to them. [Bekye, 1991; 283]

While it is true that the missionaries were blinded by ignorance and prejudice in their initial interpretations of indigenous beliefs, Bekye minimised the possible degree to which converts actually adapted their representations of traditional beliefs to new religious ideas.

CONVERSION AS A HISTORICAL PROCESS

When Girault conducted his research among the LoDagaa around Diebougou, he stated that, although a quarter of them were Catholic, he had asked his questions in areas outside of the direct influence of missions (1959: 330). But this does not mean that non-Christian attitudes may not have changed as a result of the social changes mentioned above, as well as in response to the success which the Catholic notion of God was having. Indeed, it would help explain the source of Naangminle as well as its timing: by the 1950s the evangelical work of the missionaries was at a virtual standstill.63 After two decades many initial converts had withdrawn 'when they realised that despite the religion of the white men children were still dying, the rain didn't always come and the DC's forced labour was still on' (Bongvlaa, 1979: 68).

Conversion was often a temporary or ambiguous status; while the practices of converts did seem to change, conversion did not necessarily have a similar effect on their beliefs. Naameh, a dissenting voice from the

225




mediumistic perspective, pointed out that 'the practice of Christian life must not necessarily be taken to imply a corresponding change to a Christian mentality' (1986: 255). Indigenous beliefs were often predicated on a wider cosmological understanding of the world, whereas Christian doctrine was often just that-a set of fixed beliefs not capable of the same explanatory diversity or flexibility. There is a danger in regarding LoDagaa religious thinking as a systematised whole, as a coherent totality, when in fact religious thinking was, despite regularity or consensus, the product of isolated and individual experiences. Religion per se is obviously a misnomer when referring to an array of beliefs in an oral culture where there were no constraints on religious thought or practice. Indeed, there was no word in Dagaare which categorised the experiences we understand as religion (Goody, 1972: 14-15). However, one would presume that, under a set of rather constant factors, significant aspects of religious thought would have been rather uniform. On the other hand, we are confronted with a situation where there appears to have been a definite ambiguity in later representations, i.e. those recorded a generation after the arrival of the first missionaries. Could these ambiguities and inconsistencies have been the result of historical processes rather than idiosyncrasies? The indeterminacy of possible historical developments led Girault in the 1950s to characterise the LoDagaa as 'animistes monotheistes' and their religion as 'monotheisme primitif' (1959: 356). Kuukure, a LoDagaa priest, described a similar phenomenon a generation later as one of 'liturgical polytheism' obscuring 'ontological monotheism'.64 A less suspicious way of describing such an inconsistency would be merely to call it a paradox (Dabire, 1983: 236). But what was the source of the paradox, the inherent ambiguity of LoDagaa religious thought or, given representations to the contrary recorded by the first generation of missionaries, the desire of a new generation to rewrite past representations? With regard to the latter option, we must admit that we are not actually addressing what the LoDagaa thought so much as what observers have said they thought. We are dealing with literate representations of oral beliefs. There is, of course, a third possibility. That non- Christian ideas of god among the LoDagaa changed and became ambiguous. If such were the case, the first two options could be true. But this requires admitting history to the interpretation of LoDagaa beliefs.

At a cognitive level, conversion was not an event but a complicated process of syncretism. The renunciation of indigenous practices did not mean that corresponding beliefs were also discarded.65 'Fetishes' were external representations of LoDagaa belief in noumenal agencies, just as medals, statues of saints and crosses, which Christians wore or kept in their homes, physically manifested new religious practices. Christians continued to believe in their ancestors even though they did not maintain shrines to them, just as non-Christians believed in the power of the medal of the Virgin Mary or mel even though they did not destroy their shrines; and significantly, those Christians who did destroy their shrines did so only after they had received the mel. Initially, for Christians and non-Christians alike, the medal of the blessed Virgin Mary was merely a more powerful physical representation of noumenal power than any indigenous shrine or religious object (Naameh, 1986: 179, 190-1, 196-7). The missionaries were fully aware that belief in

226




the power of the mel was the source of many of its early followers (Germain, 1937: 84).

Admittedly, there are definite problems in assessing the degree to which Catholicism altered indigenous religious perceptions. There are no sources for what the LoDagaa believed before the advent of missionaries. In addition, unlike political structures, religious thought is far less susceptible to observation. And, finally, conversion was never a static or unequivocal process, but full of change and ambiguity. When Christianity did not provide satisfactory answers, many Christians returned to indigenous beliefs and practices. The potential for cultural change as a result of evangelisation, not to mention colonisation, has been largely ignored. While Der and Bekye, writing in the 1980s, sought to compress the distance between Christian and non-Christian cultures as a means of legitimating the former in terms of the latter for indigenous purposes, and to legitimate the latter in terms of the former for external purposes, Roger Some attacked the whole notion of commensurability between LoDagaa culture and Christianity. He denied the commensurability of the Christian God with a supreme being, arguing that LoDagaa beliefs were historically conditioned and not static. Not only did he suggest that the notion of worship of a high god among the LoDagaa was a serious distortion of indigenous culture, he argued that the term Naangmin was not even an indigenous concept, but a missionary neologism which had gained currency among non-Christians in response to the monotheistic thinking which was such an important part of Christianity, and argued that to preserve LoDagaa culture it was necessary for there to be a break away from external modes of thought, and especially from Catholicism.67

This programme was the very antithesis of the redemption proposed by the Catholic clergy itself; namely, reducing the distance between LoDagaa culture and Catholicism.68 According to Some the connection between the LoDagaa god and Christian God occurred as a result of missionary convenience and indigenous adaptation, rather than any genuine theological similarities or cultural affinities. While Goody, Der, Bekye, and others used structural similarities as a means of explaining why so many LoDagaa embraced Christianity so quickly, Some stated that these similarities were mimetic rather than original. The imitation of Catholicism which occurred with the first contact was reinforced by the fact that the missionaries soon assimilated LoDagaa beliefs to convince the LoDagaa that they worshipped the same god (Some, 1991: 40). The process continued despite the indigenisation of the Catholic Church in the 1960s, further obscuring the lines of distinction between Catholic and indigenous religious thought: 'Bien entendu, tous les Dagara, aujourd'hui, ne sont pas christianises, mais il n'empeche ils ont gagnes pour le mode de pensee chretien car ils ne vivent pas isoles mais toujours avec ceux qui se sont convertis' (Some, 1991: 40).

The main point which Some's criticisms raised was that of historical change. While Der, Bekye and others assumed that beliefs were the same in the 1970s and 1980s as they had been two or three generations before, Some's attack on these assumptions highlighted how unrealistic their assumptions concerning the immutability of non-Christian beliefs were. It is impossible to ignore the tremendous change in social scale and the resulting changes in cognitive structures which have occurred over the last three

227




generations among the LoDagaa. Horton has argued that such religions tend to be particularistic, both in their geographical specificity and in their fragmentation of noumenal powers. The former is the result of restricted social and cultural communications, while the latter is the result of the underlying cognitive purposes of beliefs, 'explanation/prediction/control' (Horton, 1993a). Those boundaries, both geographical and cognitive, had disappeared for most LoDagaa before the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, communications were transformed by colonial conquest itself, with its political engineering and labour recruitment schemes; a transformation which was complete before the missionaries had even arrived. As for the changes in cognition, explanation, prediction, and control continued to be as important, but the focus became wider, admitting not only the power of a remote god but also a foreign God who was supported by doctors, nurses, and a restricted, but effective, set of pharmacological medicines (Hawkins, forthcoming).

From a non-Christian perspective the conditions which had made any concept of a supreme god remote and distant had certainly disappeared by the 1970s and 1980s, and perhaps even as early as the 1950s, when Goody and Girault made their enquiries. It would be difficult to assume in the face of these changing contexts that indigenous beliefs were not susceptible to alteration. Yet that is what a series of observers have done. By isolating and, even, segregating non-Christian thought it has been denied the possibility of a history. Even Some, who admitted to the mutability of indigenous thought under 'modern' conditions, denied the authenticity of the changes he imputed by insisting that only pre-missionary beliefs were genuine. This is a very historicist understanding of authenticity, privileging culture over society, history over practice, but one which often pervades studies of African religion and ethnicity (Peel, 1994: 163).

CONCLUSION

The legitimacy of change is the crux of the two examples of historicism discussed in this article. In both instances we find the same corrupting and distorting features: ambiguous and uncertain attitudes towards the past. For example, how do we explain the conflicting accounts of LoDagaa concepts of god? Horton and others have suggested that the mediumistic approach to African religions found in much of contemporary African theology, and very apparent among Christian interpreters of LoDagaa religious concepts in recent decades, was the product of adherence to the conceptual framework of Western religious discourse. Contemporary African theology, in the face of the recalcitrant reality of religious practices, has often adopted the strategy of reinventing the past in order to demonstrate commensurability (Horton, 1993b: 165, 171). Bekye addressed such criticism by insisting that LoDagaa religion was relatively immutable. 'The image of God that emerges from a tradition, such as the [LoDagaa's], cannot legitimately be said to be the creation either of Christian theology, or of nationalistic interests, both of which are recent experiences' (1991: 44, 221-2). However, by arguing that LoDagaa culture was the product of 'the long distant past' Bekye denied a history to LoDagaa thought. 'Living tradition', received by way of

228




generational transmission from a fount of 'ancestral heritage', was isolated from the possibility of change: a position which earlier missionaries would have agreed with in so far as they required the renunciation of 'traditional' beliefs, thereby ignoring the possibility of their modification or christianisa- tion (p. 221). Similarly, the political engineering of the colonial era bequeathed tremendous ambiguities to societies such as the LoDagaa. Because a fictional version of the past was used in the 1930s to substantiate, legitimate, and maintain the chiefs whom the British had already created, it was necessary for the LoDagaa to perpetuate that fiction in the post-colonial period even though most were aware of it being just that, a fiction. Colonialism, by defining legitimacy in purely historical terms and at the same time denying African societies history or politics, i.e. the capacity for action and innovation, created the monster of neo-traditionalism (Staniland, 1975: 76-7, 172-3; Davis, 1987).

A number of historians have noted the temporal confusion of tradition and modernity within the colonial and post-colonial worlds. Staniland used the term 'dysrhythmic change' to refer to this phenomenon among the Dagbon. Vansina highlighted a similar situation in the post-colonial world of equatorial Africa which had produced 'cultural schizophrenics, striving for a new synthesis which could not be achieved as long as freedom of action was denied them' (Vansina, 1990: 247). Mudimbe has examined these temporal tensions in spatial terms, designating a 'confused intermediary area' between tradition and modernity in discourses on contemporary Africa. The challenge for many African intellectuals has been how to bridge this ostensible gap (Mudimbe, 1988: 191-200). To conceptualise these discontinuities in temporal terms, to historicise spatial relationships between local African worlds, such as that of the LoDagaa, and the surrounding world is to ignore the fact that those worlds were contemporaneous and integrated.

The search for the traditional precipitated by the introduction of indirect rule was really about disguising and perpetuating a colonial tyranny. Indirect rule did not preserve, but marginalised and distorted, LoDagaa society and political relations. Similarly, arguments over the authenticity of claims to the chieftaincy of Zambo in 1977 were not about the tensions between the traditional and the modern, but about tensions between local and national sources of power. Steiner's study of the art markets of C6te d'Ivoire and their relationship with indigenous and Western value systems, both aesthetic and economic, provides a graphic illustration of the predicament of neo- traditionalism. In the art markets it is Western dealers and collectors who determine and control value. Historicism or, as defined earlier, 'an excessive regard for the institutions and values of the past', deeply influences external aesthetic values. In order to appeal to this market, fakes or reproductions are required, thereby denying artists and artisans the power to produce in terms of indigenous values. The fetish of the authentic and the antique, not merely bequeathed but constantly reiterated by Western markets, imposes tremendous limitations on aesthetic expression because the contemporary is rejected as inauthentic or illegitimate. Although traders, and in turn artists and artisans, react to these values, they understand the Western focus on time as actually a question of space (Steiner, 1994: 102-4).

229




LoDagaa traditions were produced within the same matrix as the trade in African art; it became necessary to historicise LoDagaa social and political practices in order for them to achieve legitimacy. Appeals to external, historicist values, whether by shooting an elephant (pre-colonial) or by claims to office by virtue of the precedent of being the descendant of the first colonial appointee (thereby creating proto-tradition out of the early colonial era) were oriented not in time but in space. The quest for legitimacy in many African societies during the colonial and post-colonial eras has sought to reduce the distance between the values of encompassing political structures, district, regional and national, and the reality of peoples lives. Africa was not unique in this reaction. As Henige noted, whenever societies have lost sovereignty through foreign domination they have sought to recover some degree of legitimacy through 'the discovery of hitherto unsuspected antiquity' (1974: 7). Historicism became an instrument of power and control among the LoDagaa in the post-colonial era by removing political struggles to a historical arena.69

Without the threat of history as the arbiter of legitimacy, traditions would not have to be invented, just as without the threat of art-the transformation of aesthetic objects into commodities according to Western economic values-there would be no need for fakes and reproductions. When an elephant was shot in the forests across the Black Volta at the end of the farming season of 1984 it was not a fake or inauthentic art, but an attempt to construct an argument for political legitimacy out of LoDagaa cultural symbols instead of appealing to the vagaries of national politics. It was an attempt at synthesis similar to those intellectual efforts examined by Mudimbe. However, synthesis has been historicised and pathologised in contemporary Africa as 'cultural hybridism, schizophrenia, and other metaphoric diseases', all resulting from 'a normative conception of history' (Mudimbe, 1988: 195). There is within the binary poles of historical classification of African realities no room for such syntheses. These binary terms create a temporal apartheid.

It is under these specific, although not unique, circumstances that it is suggested that the notion of tradition, already abused and discredited, be jettisoned. Discourses over authenticity in Africa are actually, despite their temporal language, grounded in spatial rather than temporal realities. Still denied the capacity to create their own history, to organise and govern'their own lives, most rural African societies have been forced to invent history to deal with the disjunctures which foreign rule, colonial as well as post- colonial, have created.

To a large degree history as a distinct form of knowledge that deals with the relationship between the past and the present, became necessary only during this century; not because the LoDagaa had never experienced change, but because they had never had to disguise changes from external arbiters. But history, the production of formal knowledge of the past, has not, and will not, resolve the tensions of twentieth-century LoDagaa society. What will is the recovery of lost sovereignty, i.e. the ability to invent 'new structures [not histories] to cope with a new situation' (Vansina, 1990: 247). The imagining of tradition in African cultures should be seen as a substitute for the exercise of power, i.e. the autonomy to practise history rather than produce it.

230




Conversely, the imposition of invented traditions should be seen as part of an exercise in disguising political power and forcing African societies to produce history rather than engage in politics. The legacy of historicism in LoDagaa society, as elsewhere in Africa, has been a preoccupation with interpretation and the paralysis of practice.

This raises the question of tradition versus practice which is at the heart of the disagreement between Vansina and a new generation of African historians.70 Although Vansina's resurrected notion of tradition admits to change it does not seem to accept certain types of change. He argues that tradition needs autonomy, and 'is maimed when autonomy is lost' (p. 259). Yet it was when autonomy was lost that many African cultures were forced to imagine traditions. This unfortunately implies, as Ranger has observed, that colonialism was historically illegitimate just as it exaggerates the degree of 'stultification' which resulted from foreign rule (Ranger, 1993a: 75-80). For better or worse, Africans did react to colonisation and evangelisation, often even acting as the primary agents, if not initiators, of both. Although they did not usually do so under conditions of autonomy, it is arbitrary to disqualify those reactions and, thereby, deny colonial subjects the limited degrees of autonomy which did exist.

What then differentiates a legitimate, or traditional, as it were, from an illegitimate change? Vansina suggested that there were static principles inherent in traditions, 'such as the existence of a single God', which did not change once they were formulated and which thereafter acted as the criteria against which possible changes had to be tested (Vansina, 1990: 258). If it is accepted that the LoDagaa did not worship god, and that this was a basic principle, then LoDagaa Christians cannot claim to be part of LoDagaa tradition. But what if, as Some argued, non-Christian concepts of god were modified? Can the notion of essential stasis be maintained, or does that mean that the autonomy of practitioners destroyed the tradition? In his comments on historicity in the study of Yoruba religion Peel has argued that the essential dilemma which such interpretations pose is whether Yoruba religion is defined by whatever practices the Yoruba perform, or by practices which are uniquely Yoruba.

In the former case the defining unit of analysis is Yoruba society, in the latter it is certain given forms [Vansina's traditions] of Yoruba culture.... An anthropology which thus privileges culture over society runs a serious risk of ignoring the implications of religious choices being made in the world today. [Peel, 1994: 163]

The notion of tradition privileges culture, ignoring that continuity, often seen as unexceptional, is the product of social practice active and conscious decisions (Feierman, 1990: 3-17; Cohen, 1989; Bourdieu, 1977). It is just for this reason that Cohen called for the 'undefining', or unprivileging, of oral tradition (1989: 12-16).

LoDagaa practices and beliefs include Catholicism if we are to understand that designation socially, and not fall prey to notions of cultural essentialism. If observers such as Bekye could have admitted to the legitimacy, let alone the possibility, of indigenous cultural change, their arguments concerning the commensurability of Christian and non-Christian beliefs would have been

231




situated in the present, and not have had to depend on a considerable amount of historical revision. But they insisted on representing ideas about god as if they were static principles in order to establish their legitimacy. Attempts at proving the existence of a pre-missionary worship of god were highly contrived. Yet what was really being represented, a variety of contemporary LoDagaa religious beliefs and practices, was legitimate, but not in terms which would satisfy external religious authorities.71

For the indigenous clergy it was necessary to go back in time in order to establish the legitimacy of their representations of LoDagaa beliefs. However, given the available historical evidence, what they represented was not what the LoDagaa once thought-the only evidence they had for this was the very missionaries whose views they were trying to contradict-but the effective synthesis which had already occurred between paganism and Catholicism. But what are non-Christian beliefs? Beliefs held before the arrival of missionaries, beliefs held by contemporary non-Christians, or beliefs not approved of by the Catholic Church? If one accepts the idea of radical or complete inculturation, it should not matter. Yet it does, because of the tyranny of historicism. Why did the Catholic clergy not simply argue that non-Christian culture had already been christianised and therefore deserved to be accepted as merely a cultural expression of Christianity? Primarily because inculturation was based on the idea of a unique and unchanging non- Christian culture. Therefore it was necessary to disguise syncretism and reject the representations of their missionary predecessors, which documented a contrary version of non-Christian beliefs.

There was an irony here. The indigenous clergy were in the process of making LoDagaa Catholicism more local in the 1970s and 1980s, but they were able to do so only by making indigenous beliefs seem more universal or macrocosmic. The efforts of LoDagaa priests to reconcile the local with the universal parallel recent debates on the theory of conversion. Several authors have criticised Horton's argument that expansion in space, which usually coincided with conversion, created a more immediate and unique sense of god. Fisher has pointed out that it is useful to delineate different stages of conversion, and in the initial stage the idea of god may well be far less important, despite the rhetoric of missionaries, than the effect of agents themselves (1985: 158, 165). Most recently Ranger (1993b) has attacked conceptualisations of African religions as local. His criticisms were not directed at Horton, and indeed Ranger's argument does not necessarily contradict that of Horton, but it does help to modify the thrust of Horton's analysis. Ranger suggested that missionary Christianity was not as macrocosmic as has been assumed. The fact that the White Fathers immediately called their God Naangmin is indicative of the degree to which they became microcosmic. Adaptation, as with inculturation, had spatial as well as cultural implications. As Kuukure noted, the pyramid which structures the mediumistic representations of Naangmin is historically untenable, relying on a colonial etymology. 'Naangmin becomes head, chief ngmin, chief god, even though naa-chief in the colonial, hierarchical, pyramidal sense-would be surprising, since some have insisted that there were no such chiefs before the arrival of Europeans' (Kuukure, 1985: 45).

232




And so we come full circle. Without the invention of chiefs Naangmin might not have been imaginable.

As with arguments concerning the provenance or legitimacy of chiefs among the LoDagaa, interpretations of LoDagaa concepts of god have depended on historicist reasoning. Inculturation, a prescriptive idea with a still ill-defined sense of legitimate pluralism, has led to such developments in theological interpretations, just as indirect rule, a permissive and pragmatic policy, led to similar forms of historical revision. But not only have these similar policies led to analogous views of history, they have also engendered identical arguments. With both indirect rule and inculturation, indigenous political structures and religious culture could be used or recognised only in so far as they accorded, respectively, with Western notions of political order and divinity. In order for administrators to apply indirect rule they needed to rewrite the past to legitimate the changes they themselves had wrought. In order for priests to avail themselves of the advantages of inculturation, they needed to historicise religious syncretism.

NOTES 1 J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition

(Oxford, 1989), vol. VII, p. 261. The backward-looking character of rural colonial cultures was a product of the loss of former securities, not an inherent cultural dynamic (Feierman, 1990: 44). Stock has suggested a useful distinction between two forms of tradition-'traditional' and 'traditionalistic' behaviour. The former is merely an habitual action, while the latter is 'the self-conscious affirmation of traditional norms'. He argued that some forms of modernity emerged only when the distance between these two forms of tradition became irreconcilable, and acknowledgement of a disjuncture with the past was unavoidable (Stock, 1990: 164-6).

2 But this is not intended as a postmodernist indulgence in despair (Vansina, 1994: 217-20). There is a wider point here. It has been suggested that modern academic history, with its positivist assumptions, is of limited relevance to the experiences of most Africans; that academic history in Africa does not follow indigenous forms of knowledge about the past because it addresses non-indigenous issues and follows a distinctly non-African consciousness of history. Although the discursive nature of historical consciousness was not part of many pre- colonial African cultures, practical historical consciousness in many African cultures did assume historicist features during the colonial period. It can be argued that changes were disguised as traditions in the colonial period only to satisfy the historical sensibility of colonial administrations, yet that sensibility was bequeathed to most colonial societies and still operates in contemporary Africa in similar ways. Historicism, as the source of both political and religious legitimacy, was, as we will see in the case of the LoDagaa, internalised by at least the literate representatives of that culture. Although debunking these representations of the past has been an attractive and productive pursuit for contemporary historians, it has to be remembered that distinctions between genuine and artificial traditions, or a veridical versus a mythologised history, were not necessarily reflected in the actions or interpretations which traditions of either variety may have inspired. The forensic accuracy of historical representations is often of little interest to social actors (Staniland, 1975: 174; Wilks, 1989: 29).

I2 have used the term LoDagaa here even though it is not an indigenous ethnonym. It was invented by Jack Goody in the 1950s as a strategy for coping with an extremely complicated ethnographic situation. (Goody, 1956: 16-26). The reasons for doing so are threefold. The first is that there was no ethnonym among these people at the beginning of this century. Secondly, although various observers have criticised the term 'LoDagaa' and attempted to construct identities around other ethnonyms, there is still no consensus. Finally, in the absence of any strong sense of collective consciousness, these terms are of little concern to the people themselves. Those referred to here as the LoDagaa were known in colonial discourse as the Lobi and Dagarti. At present the two most prevalent terms among indigenous scholars are

233




Dagaara (Dagara) and Dagaaba (Dagaba). There are important political implications in the use of either of these terms over the other which make their use problematic and inadvisable. (For example, see Tuurey, 1982; Der, 1989.)

4 For the purposes of clarity, 'god' (with lower-case g) is used to refer to the LoDagaa concept of a supreme being, whereas 'God' (with a capital G) is used to refer to the Christian concept. The orthographic distinction does not suggest any sense of hierarchy and has been employed only for convenience.

NAG ADM 56/1/50, Reports on Tours of Inspection North West Province, Capt. Moutray- Read, March-May 1905.

6 Contemporary accounts of selection do not survive. From subsequent disputes over colonial offices, however, it is apparent that this was frequently the basis of selection. See NAG ADM 61/5/8, Lawra District Diary, 12 December 1917. The DC was informed by the chief of Gengenkpe that when the first officer from Wa had passed through the area all the people had run away, with the exception of his grandfather. The latter received the officer and was promised a paramountcy over surrounding settlements. This unfulfilled promise was the source of some frustration to the grandson, who still entertained such aspirations. 7 RAT ADM 7, Native Administration 1918-28, Ag. CSP to CCNT, 20 July 1928. While Cardinall referred to the activities of slavers in this era, he regarded their effects on social conditions as merely contributory, and not in themselves the cause of this 'chaos'.

8 RAT ADM 423, 'Interim Report on the Peoples of Nandom and Lambussie Divisions of Lawra District', DC, Lawra, 1932, 28.

9 RAT ADM 144, Tugu Affairs, DC, Lawra, to CNP, 3 September 1927. 10 RAT ADM 143, Political Prisoners, CNP to CCNT, 16 September 1927. In fact the

official policy of administration through native tribunals was not begun in the Northern Province until 1928. See NAG ADM 145-146, Native Administration, CNP to DCs NP, 15 August 1928.

RAT ADM 144, Tugu Affairs, CCNT to CNP, 24 September 1927. 12 RAT ADM 145-146, Native Administration, DC, Lawra, to CNP, 26 November 1928. 13 RAT ADM 424, 'Comments of "Interim Report on the Peoples of Nandom and

Lambussie Divisions of Lawra District" ', 1933, 22. 14 Ibid., 26: 'The fact that the outside power of the "White Man" has set up a Chief

irrespective of the existing organisation, has already in some cases set him also beyond the religious sanctions or laws of his own community [tengaan].' 1 Ibid., 25.

16 Ibid., 25. 17 Distinctions between the two methods of administration, as Afigbo argued, are

misleading and superficial (Afigbo, 1972: 3-6). Both Staniland and Ladouceur described indirect rule in the Northern Territories as a failure (Staniland, 1975: 103; Ladouceur, 1979).

18 For example, when Gandah, the chief of Birifu, died (1950) he left thirty-five widows, and Karbo, the chief of Lawra, was said to have had sixty-five wives. As Goody noted, the wealth of these chiefs not only rivalled, but often surpassed, that of their counterparts in the ancient states of the region (1975: 97).

19 RAT ADM 342-343, Informal Diary, Lawra, October 1943: 'Very successful Nandom N.A. meeting in the morning discussing the vexed question of labour on the chiefs' farms which has been simmering for three years, and which has, in the past, I think, given an easy handle to any malcontents.' The identification of any commoner complainant against a chief as a 'malcontents' was indicative of officers' attitudes during this period. Complainants were merely regarded as inconvenient trouble-makers, not intent on seeking redress but simply seeking to make a nuisance of themselves. For examples of how the chiefs disguised their exploitation see RAT ADM 272, Informal Diary, Lawra, November 1937; RAT ADM 301, Informal Diary, Lawra. January 1938.

20 RAT ADM 7, Native Administration, Ag. CSP to CCNT, 20 July 1928. 21 Ibid. 22 RAT ADM 65, Native Authorities, GC Gov. to Sec. of State for the Colonies, copy n.d.

[1932]. 23 RAT ADM 153, 'Memorandum on Native Authority in the Northern Territories', Ag.

CCNT, 18 March 1931. 24

Namely the slave raiding of Samory and Babatu referred to in Cardinall's report of 1928. These incidents were also referred to by Rattray (1932; 236) and quoted by the Korsah

234




Commission (Gold Coast Colony, Report of Commission on Native Courts, 1951, Accra: Government Printer, 1951, p. 8). The conquest of these raiders by colonial forces, and the consequent removal of the threat of slave raiding, was a theme exploited by the administration in its propaganda which preceded the introduction of taxation. See RAT ADM 229, Native Administration (General) Taxation Assessment 1931-32. PC NP to DC's NP, 6 January 1932.

25 NAG ADM 56/1/91, Laws and Customs of the Northern Territories. 'Report on Dagarti Civil Law', PC NWP, 22 November 1908, 29.

26 See RAT ADM 206, Political Conferences, 'Minutes of Political Conference 2/3 December 1933'. When it was suggested by one DC that 'customary laws' for the different courts be recorded, 'it was generally agreed that some broad rules might be laid down, but the fewer the better'. Even if social practices had been codified, the court assessors were illiterate and would, therefore, not have been able to avail themselves of any of the possible advantages of such records. The immediate advantage of codification would have been to deny the changes which colonialism had wrought by situating such practices in the pre-colonial era. In 1952, twenty years after indirect rule had begun, and when preparations were being made for the transition from Native Authority to Local Council Courts, the Acting Chief Justice of the Gold Coast suggested that codification would finally be necessary before traditional authorities could be replaced by lay, judicial representatives, 'as the sole repositor, of native customary law lies in the memories of linguists and certain chiefs'. The Chief Regional Officer (formerly Chief Commissioner) replied, 'I do not share the acting Chief Justice's view.... In my opinion customary law is widely known and rarely disputed.' (RAT ADM 868, Native Courts, Ag. Chief Justice to Perm. Sec. of Local Gov., 5 September 1952; CRO to Per. Sec. of Local Gov., 16 October 1952.)

27 RAT ADM 145-146, Native Administration, DC, Lawra, to CNP, 26 November 1928. 28 RAT ADM 153, 'Memorandum on Native Authority in the Northern Territories', Ag.

CCNT, 18 March 1931. 29 RAT ADM 868, Native Courts, DC, Lawra, to DC, Wa, 19 September 1947. 30 RAT ADM 7, Native Administration, 'Report on the Native Authorities in the Northern

Territories', Ag. CSP to CCNT, 20 July 1928. 31 A prime example of this were the tensions which developed between Birifu and Lawra. In

1949 the chiefs of Birifu's son, B. Gandah, had joined the southern-based UGCP following the Lawra Naa's membership of the Coussey Commission, where he had developed links with other northern chiefs. Following the death of the Birifu Naa that year, his successor and other sons began to agitate for their own Local Council (replacements for Native Authorities which were established in 1952) separate from Lawra. They complained that Birifu was inhabited by an entirely different 'tribe' (LoWiili), with separate 'customs', from that of the rest of Lawra division (LoDagaa), with the result that ever since it had been under Lawra the 'Birifuman' had always been discriminated against. Responding to the contention that this oppression had led to the emigration of LoWiili, the DC noted, 'It is indeed due to oppression, but to the oppression of Birifors by the Gandah family' (the petitioners). He also observed that there were only seven literate persons in all of the Birifu area and all belonged to the chief's lineage. RAT ADM 72, Native Authority, Lawra, Birifu Naa to DC, Wa, 4 November 1951; and DC, Wa, to CCNT, 28 November 1951. See also Ladouceur (1979: 120-1) for a discussion of the role of rivalries in determining political party affiliations.

32 For example the Nandom Naa, Imoru Puobey, who had been a founding member of the NPP, withdrew his support from the party in the 1954 election when he learned that they had chosen A. Karbo, the Lawra Naa's son, as their candidate. A relative of the Nandom Naa, Polkuu Konkuu Chiiri, stood as an independent. Although unsuccessful electorally, he succeeded Imoru in 1958 as Nandom Naa. Because of Karbo's leading role in the opposition, the CPP granted favours to Chiiri and maintained his position as chief in the face of local opposition. (Ladouceur, 1979: 121, 183.)

3The relevant legislative provisions were established by the Local Courts Act of 1958 and the Local Courts Act (Establishment) Instrument of 1960. Appointment of Local Court magistrates became the responsibility of the Minister of Local Government. However, the CPP made more direct attacks on the role of chiefs in the independent state during this period, beginning with the Chiefs (Recognition) Act of 1959, which gave the government the power to appoint or dismiss any chief, and followed by the Local Government (Amendment) Act of 1959, which abolished the representation of 'traditional' members on local councils. Under the

235




new constitution of the First Republic, the Chieftaincy Act of 1961 made all chiefs' powers dependent on government recognition. (Goldschmidt, 1981: 168-75).

4The first magistrate in Lawra District was B. Gandah, a member of the chief of Birifu Naa's lineage, which had supported the CPP in order to pursue their rivalry against the Lawra Naa, a stalwart of the NPP. Gandah had joined the UGCC in 1949 (before the establishment of the CPP later that year) following a tour of the north by J. B. Danquah. By that time the Gandahs had begun agitating for local autonomy for Birifu, which was then a sub-division of Lawra. The Lawra Naa, J. A. Karbo, had already entered politics a year earlier when appointed a member of the Coussey Commission. As Ladouceur (1979: 88) noted, the only significant difference in the profiles of CPP and NPP supporters was that the latter tended to have somewhat higher 'traditional' status. In the case of the Gandah family the anti-colonial line of the CPP would have been appealing, given their struggle against the local administration. In turn Karbo had little cause for resentment, having done well under colonial rule.

35 Chiefs continued to go on hearing disputes in an unofficial capacity. Successive magistrates tolerated the chiefs as mere arbitrators and ignored the fact that they heard the vast majority of disputes as agencies of first instance. Schott (1985: 162-8) noted that under the Second Republic (1969-72) the prerogatives of the Bulsa chiefs to the east of the LoDagaa were restricted even more, to the point where 'the chiefs had been divested of even this restricted jurisdiction in private matters and had been expressly forbidden to intercede even as arbitrators in marital disputes and other disputes'. However, this situation improved again under the Third Republic. (Goldschmidt, 1981: 184 f.) Writing of the authority of the neighbouring Sisala chiefs during the 1970s, Mendonsa observed, 'today the power of the chief is limited. He functions mainly as a figurehead and spokesman of the government. Judicial cases are brought before the chiefs, but they have no sanctions except referral to the district court in Tumu. Wise chiefs, however, use persuasion and prestige of office to settle cases before they reach this point. Villagers may bypass the chief and carry a case directly to the police and court in Tumu.' (Mendonsa, 1982: 49.) In Lawra District during this period a similar situation existed. Chiefs continued to hear cases, both informally and formally (despite the absence of recognition and often to the annoyance of the magistrates), but always unofficially.

36 This was only a potential succession dispute; at the time A. Karbo, the successor to the former Lawra Naa, was a senior civil servant working in Accra. His place had been filled for many years by a regent, but some residents of Lawra were impatient with his delay in succeeding his father and had begun agitating for his return. It was hoped that because of his prominence in the government he would provide better representation at a regional level of that part of Lawra District. At the time the Nandom Naa was a member of the ruling Provisinal National Defence Committee and it was believed that Nandom might be favoured in the distribution of government resources for that reason. Eventually Karbo retired and moved back to Lawra to assume the office of Lawra Naa.

37 Animals such as the elephant, and including the lion, buffalo, leopard, hyena, hippopotamus, boar, antelope, and crocodile, as well as any domestic animals killed in the wild, were regarded as 'dun soola, literally, black animals', or dangerous animals whose death at the hands of a hunter could invite 'mystical dangers'. (Goody, 1962: 109.) 38 Lawra Traditional Council, 'Re: Appeal record of proceedings, Zambo Skin Affairs', mimeograph, A. A. Tuureh reg., (1977), p. 45.

39 In 1966 one of the first acts of the NCL was to institute the Chieftaincy (Amendment) Decree (NLCD 122), which made provision for redressing any changes affecting traditional offices made by the previous government. (Mensah-Brown, 1969). 40 Lawra Traditional Council, 'Re: Appeal record of proceedings, Zambo Skin Affairs', A. A. Tuureh reg. (1977), 19.

41 Ibid., p. 59.

42 Following the recommendations of the Mensah Commission (1978), the constitution of

the Third Republic withdrew the right of the government to interfere with the recognition of 'traditional' offices. But as Goldschmidt (1981: 185) noted, 'It must be emphasised, however, that no constitutional provision withdrawing government recognition of chiefs can erase the fact that the whole chieftaincy system has been influenced by the tradition of government recognition dating from colonial times'. The state remained deeply implicated in chieftaincy matters in areas such as Lawra where there were no genuinely traditional criteria for succession.

236



LODAGAA CHIEFS AND GOD 237

43 One narrative claimed that the first recorded chief or naa was Kyiir, a wealthy trader and recognised leader of the village of Nandom. In this history the British did not create Kyiir's authority, they merely acknowledged it by making him chief. Accordingly, succession was the choice of the incumbent, who was the source of his own power. In another narrative it was the tengaansob who was given the position of chief by the British, but he delegated it to Kyiir. Thereafter this narrative claimed that any successor needed the approval of the tengaansob. Both narratives were undermined by the fact that succession had always been problematic, inviting similar arguments on three previous occasions, and in two of those cases the matter was decided by the vote of colonial headmen, while in the last (1958) it was the intervention of the post-colonial government which resolved the dispute. In 1931 the colonial state had used election by headmen to resolve the matter, but by independence it was necessary to distinguish between modem political representatives and traditional office. In 1958, when Naa Polkuu was recognised by the state, his rival, who had formerly argued that it was not the will of the predecessor which determined succession but the approval of the tengaansob, shifted suddenly and argued that the traditional means of succession was actually the ballot. (Lentz, 1993: 204). This argument was ignored by the state, which refused to hear an appeal. In the 1980s, even more than during the colonial period, when the state was able and willing to create its own rules of succession, historicity, or appeal to 'tradition', was even more important. The state could not relinquish power by allowing elections, and certainly not when democracy was suspended at the national level.

Indeed, Babatuoronaa Kuorikuo was challenged for the position even though his rule had not been recognised by the NRC. Kpeng's strategy appears to have been not only to pre-empt official recognition but also to challenge de facto public recognition within the community that had enabled Babatuoronaa Kuorikuo to continue in office.

45 Chieftaincy was part of regional communication structures wrought during the colonial era, whereas pre-colonial structures had been parochial. After independence regional politics was threatened by power based at a national level, and, even though recognition was restricted, the overreaching structures remained intact. Whereas chieftaincy made little sense at the beginning of the colonial era, once the scale of people's lives had expanded greatly, chieftaincy was appropriate to the new social scale which colonialism had brought to politics. In the aftermath of colonialism, that scale expanded yet again to encompass a national level. Because of the instability of wider political structures, and their inability to create a sufficient infrastructure of communications, the institution of chieftaincy has remained spatially relevant, helping people negotiate between the parochial level of their everyday lives and the regional and national levels of political control. It was this relevance that had enabled Babatuoronaa Kuorikuo to rule in an unofficial capacity. Chiefs continued to act as agents of political cohesion between the state and LoDagaa society, but where once they had answered to those above, since the 1960s they were increasingly inclined to listen to those below. (Som6, 1969: 21-2.)

46 Arguments over democracy were mistrusted in no small part because of the failure of such ideas at the national level. Military coups and political interference had shown that the idea was illusory, if not also inherently dangerous.

47 The first of these putative states had been established by Mossi migrations, which imposed states over the LoDagaa in Kaleo and Wechiau. (Tuurey, 1982: 42.) This was followed by refugees from Buna who had fled the Gonja invasion of the late sixteenth century and settled in Dorimon, where another state was established. (Tuurey, 1982: 40-1, 50.) In all, Tuurey identified only three possible states, all south of Nadowli in Wa District, and none established by the LoDagaa. Implicit in Tuurey's argument was the suggestion that these proto- states represented the germs of statehood, thereby mitigating the sense of embarrassment which came with the term 'statelessness'.

48 Regarding examples of political centralisation which occurred in the late nineteenth century in a few villages which functioned more like towns, such as Ulo, Yelpaala (1983: 361-3) stated, 'It is plausible to suggest, then, that both internal and external conditions were such that the transformation of the [LoDagaa] state from a non-centralized system to a centralized one was a real, even an imminent possibility.' Yelpaala concluded that a centralised state had been a 'possibility' at the end of the nineteenth century, owing to internal tendencies (clientage) and external pressures (insecurity). However, this ostensible process of transformation from non-centralised to centralised state was undone by colonisation and the imposition of a hierarchical model. What form indigenous political developments would have



238 LODAGAA CHIEFS AND GOD

resulted in was never mentioned. Yelpaala merely claimed that because some Western political anthropologists had equated political authority and social order exclusively with the state, he was entitled to conclude that because there was political authority and social order among the LoDagaa before the colonial period there must have been a state, albeit one without hierarchy or centralisation; in other words, an oxymoronic state. What is even more curious about this argument is the insistence on calling the acephalous social organisation of the LoDagaa a state, albeit minus hierarchy, law-making, and law enforcement. A definition of the state merely 'as an ever present phenomenon' makes such a category meaningless. His intention was to expunge any negative connotations associated with Western attitudes towards the different political system of the LoDagaa by denying any ultimate difference in LoDagaa political organisation. Why did Yelpaala find it necessary to subsume the alterity of LoDagaa social and political structures? Merely to avoid the teleological implications which classifications such as statelessness implied. In order to do so he did not rewrite the past, but reduced it to a speculative morass by arguing that 'African time' was not linear but circular and, therefore, indeterminate (p. 358). But African time is not different from any other time. While there are differences in forms of historical consciousness in different cultures, historical consciousness does not reflect different realities of time.

49 There is more ethnographic evidence to support the antiquity of the tengaansob than perhaps any other institution within the wider constellation of Voltaic societies. For palpable proof of the indigenous nature of the earth priest among the LoDagaa see the discussion of Eyre-Smith's investigations above. A large number of observers have emphasised the novelty of chieftaincy, the longevity of Earth priests, and the antipathy of the LoDagaa toward political authority. (Labouret, 1931; Rattray, 1932; Goody, 1956, 1957, 1962; Some, 1969; Angsotinge, 1986.)

50 In 1939 Pope Pius XII, discussing the relationship between Catholic faith and the different cultures of the world, wrote, 'Whatever there is in native customs that is not inseparably bound up with superstition and error will always receive kindly consideration and, when possible, will be preserved intact' (quoted in Shorter, 1988: 185). This is very reminiscent of the colonial repugnancy clause which was applied to the Native Authority Courts of indirect rule. The relevant ordinance stated that the courts would recognise 'the native law and custom prevailing in the area of the jurisdiction of such Court, so far as it is not repugnant to natural justice or morality or inconsistent with any other ordinance' (Laws of the Gold Coast, Native Courts (Northern Territories) Ordinance, 1936, 8.a). It was under Pope John XXIII, 1958-63, that the Catholic Church recognised that Western culture was not universal and, according to Shorter (1988: 188), that 'dogmas or faith-statements are culturally conditioned expressions of revelation' because they are 'influenced by the presuppositions, the concerns, the thought-categories and the available vocabulary of the culture in which they are composed'.

51 Unrestricted or unbiased familiarity with indigenous culture was limited to their childhood, and thereafter catechists were removed from the opportunity of further exposure by intensive education. In 1959 there were only six indigenous priests among the LoDagaa, and while that number increased to over forty-five twenty years later, most of these later priests were even further removed from indigenous culture, having been raised from birth in relatively strict Christian households where indigenous culture was reviled for its associations with paganism. Instruction in indigenous cultures was first offered to seminarians in 1965, but it was not until the mid-1970s that advanced study of the relationship between Catholicism and indigenous culture began, with several priests completing degrees at various institutions in Europe. (Naameh, 1986: 272-80.)

52 See note 4. 53 Accounts of this incident vary. There are two primary accounts written by some of the

missionaries themselves: Paterot (1953), McCoy (1988). The first pertains primarily to the history of the Church in the adjoining French colony, whereas the latter was written more than a half a century after the event. McCoy was assisted in the research by his cousin, who consulted the original diaries, as well as by another Father who assisted in the writing. I have also relied on Der (1974, 1983). Der based his account on the original diaries of the missionaries as well as on interviews. All these accounts were written from a strong religious conviction that the conversion process was the result of divine intervention, and the narratives of events are coloured accordingly. The present author failed, after several attempts, to gain access to the original diaries, which are kept in the mission house in Jirapa. However, the




annual reports of the mission as well as colonial reports which are available, do provide us with some alternative perspectives.

54 RAT ADM 502, Annual Report, Wa, 1946-47. However, it is necessary to treat these figures with a degree of scepticism, not because of any necessary inaccuracy in the numbers themselves, but because of what was said to constitute conversion. Conversion did not merely happen in one direction. Converts could 'lapse' back into non-Christian practices, or abandon the new beliefs entirely. 55 In the annual report for 1931-32 McCoy explained his strategy in dealing with the delegation beseeching prayers for rain: 'celui-ci leur fait une petite instruction, leur montrant l'inanit6 de leurs superstitions et f6tiches, que Dieu est seul maitre des hommes aussi bien que des 1eements; puis il leur fait faire une priere a Dieu pour demander la pluie avec promesse de continuer de se faire instruire.' (RA, 1931-32: 147.) More recent studies have confirmed this version of the nature of god among the LoDagaa. See particularly Goody (1972: 22-3), Somda (1977: 17), Dabir6 (1983: 227-8, 236) and Bekye (1991: 139).

56 The idea of god being unknown was very common in LoDagaa thought, according to the long oral recitation performed during initiation into the cult of the Bagre. Goody (1972: 22) reported being told during his fieldwork that 'people "call the name but do not know him" '. This theme of agnosticism vis-a-vis god recurs throughout the White Bagre (W/1951) and Black Bagre (B/1951) transcribed in 1951 and published by Goody in 1972: W.2396-9, 'Well, about God, we hear his name without knowing him'; W.6075-9, 'God doesn't want us to see him. He is near and yet far;' B. 3755-6, 'We hear his name but know nothing of him.' In 1969 Goody recorded new versions of the White (W/1969) and Black (B/1969) Bagre as well as a Funeral Bagre, all of which were published in Goody (1980). There are fewer references to the possibilities or limitations of knowledge of God in W/1969 than in W/1951, and in B/1969 there is a slightly different emphasis. Instead of stressing the impossibility of such knowledge, the difficulty is emphasised: B. 1054-8, 'God's human apprehensions': B.1984-85, 'It is God's matter that no one can know.'

57 According to the missionaries, the indigenous term for this god was the compound of two words which has been rendered in various ways: Naangmin, Naangmen, Naamwin, Naawen, etc. The first part of the term, naa, is somewhat problematic in meaning. It was taken to mean 'chief', which was indeed its meaning in neighbouring hierarchical societies and, since the imposition of chiefs, the primary sense which the word acquired among the LoDagaa. The second part, in different dialects ngmin, ngmen, mwin, wen, etc., referred to any spirit or deity; that was a noumenal agency with a shrine on earth towards which ritual actions could be directed. Naangmin, on the other hand, had no shrine or altar, no sacrifices were offered, nor was any liturgy associated with it. (Girault, 1959: 332-3; Goody, 1972: 22; Dabir6, 1983: 236; Bekye, 1991: 202.) Most translations have named Naangmin 'chief-god', or god in the singular, absolute sense of the word. However, this is not as clear a meaning as the compound word implies. Bekye revised earlier translations and argued that a term such as 'wealthy-deity' would be more accurate. The revision was based on two well-founded observations. If a Dagaare speaker wished to express the idea of a chief-god, the word naa would follow god, 'in order to make it a possessive'. In addition, the fact that chieftaincy was a colonial creation, and given the antipathy the LoDagaa had displayed to political authority, 'make it most unlikely that the original understanding of the term naa would have immediate chieftaincy overtones'. Bekye (1991: 207-11) actually suggested the more literal terms 'Rich-one-who-is-deity' or 'Deity-who-is-rich'. Similarly, Goody noted (1975: 30) that 'the term Naangmin, "head chief", is itself an index of this lack of uniqueness'. The linguistic integrity of Naangmin was further complicated by the fact that the word ngmin was sometimes used as an abbreviation, making it difficult to distinguish between god in the singular, absolute sense of the word or a particular god among several others. (Bekye, 1991: 153). This is not surprising, as the word was not part of any specialised religious language or liturgy, but was most frequently invoked in everyday circumstances-in the course of aphorisms and proverbs which were often the basis of theophoric names. (Hien and Hebert, 1968-69; Somda, 1977.) The ubiquity of references to Naangmin in the speech of the LoDagaa is paradoxical, given the absence of any specifically religious forms of behaviour toward this absolute deity. 'An eloquent liturgical silence seems to them the most appropriate attitude towards Naangmen' (Bekye, 1991: 216; Kusiele, 1973: 20).

58 Bekye's argument relied on a series of structural resemblances which, he argued, existed beyond the level of appearances, the most important of the latter being that the LoDagaa did

239



240 LODAGAA CHIEFS AND GOD

not sacrifice to god. 'Though the immediate destination of the people's offerings and sacrifices appears to be the [spirits], yet it is recognised that these offerings are in fact Naangmen's prerogatives. But as these spirit-patrons [the spirits] seem to act on Naangmen's behalf, and in return for the survival services believed to be rendered by them to the people, Naangmen seems to concede to them the prerogatives of the material sacrifices that the people offer in shrines and at altars erected in their honour' (Bekye, 1991: 221). This passage is very contradictory. To begin with, the use of 'appears', 'believed', and 'seems' is indicative of the uncertainty of the argument. Furthermore, if it was the spirits who rendered the services for which sacrifices were offered, why was it 'recognised' that the sacrifices belonged to god? This is a problem with all mediumistic interpretations of indigenous religions in Africa. As Ukpong observed, 'Either these gods [or lesser spirits] are recognised as free beings capable of initiating actions and carrying them through, and responsible for such actions and therefore meriting praise or blame, or they are mere instruments or channels without free will and responsibility. To say that the gods are both free beings and instruments does not make sense.' (Ukpong, 1983: 196.) 5 The difficulty which Morin encountered, and which Der overlooked, was that 'cependant le sacrifice ne s'addresse pas a Dieu directement, mais aux manes des ancetres' (Morin, 1909: 266). He explained that this was a result of the belief that god was too distant and unconcerned to receive their sacrifices and prayers. The early missionaries among the LoDagaa discovered the same sense of remoteness from god.

60 Writing of the LoDagaa. McCoy argued that 'belief in the power of the ancestors and evil spirits led to a deformation in the understanding of what constituted a sinful act' (1988: 64). So long as Naangmin was not seen as the author of misfortune there could be no true understanding of transgression.

61 Given the extent of the missionary impact, it is difficult to isolate the Naangminle movement from any external influences and treat it as an isolable phenomenon. At the very least, the missionary conceptualisation of Naangmin and the spread of the cult of Naangminle two decades later, if not causally linked, were part of the same process of expansion in the scale of communications. In the first edition of the standard ethnography of the LoDagaa, The Social Organisation of the LoWiili, published in 1956, Goody argued that although colonial occupation obviously had influenced the ethnographic situation, the effects were so obvious that they were readily identifiable and isolable: 'it is still possible to disentangle the one from the other, and I have deliberately chosen to consider the political organisation as it existed at the beginning of the century'. This adherence to a synchronic perspective was amended in the second edition of 1967, although the work itself was not modified. (Goody, 1967: x, iv.) By the 1970s, when he first addressed the issue of religious change, he still adhered to a model which, while admitting to change, situated within a hypothesised cycle of indigenous religious speculation. This maintained the structural integrity of indigenous thought and the primacy of what, at the time, was construed as native agency. While Goody was a strong proponent of historical anthropology, his study of LoDagaa religion was far less than innovative in that respect. His approach was taken up by subsequent observers. Der argued that Catholicism did not really change LoDagaa culture, while Bekye argued that 'Christian and Islamic influences on the Dagaaba are so recent that their traditional beliefs can still be studied in their relative integrity' (1991: xxix).

6 The mission station at Jirapa became, over a period of few months during the farming season of 1932, the largest congregation of LoDagaa then ever recorded. As one missionary wrote, 'La mission des lors fut litt6ralement enhavie, prise d'assaut. Monseigneur m'affirmait avoir vu lui-meme 15,000 personnes a la mission un dimanche.' (Germain, 1937: 84.) Twenty thousand people were visiting the Jirapa mission every month in the immediate aftermath of the rain incident (RA, 1931-32: 147). Crowds of five to six thousand were a regular occurrence at the Nandom mission by 1937 (Germain, 1937: 85). They came from over a wide area, and included speakers of various dialects of Dagaare, as well as some neighbouring Sisala and Lobi.

63 A growing sense of disillusionment created the opportune moment for a rival phenomenon. Although Goody described the cult as 'a "non-processual" event par excellence', had it not been for the spread of Christianity twenty years earlier it would be difficult to explain the success of the cult (Goody, 1975: 96).

64 Kuukure, as with Bekye, rejected the translation of Naangmin as 'chief-god' on etymological grounds, i.e. that the word naa had not meant 'chief' before the colonial period




(Kuukure, 1985: 45). He argued that Naangmin was not the apex of a 'beautifully hierarchically structured pantheon with so many Gods'. It was the ambiguous relationship between Naangmin and ngmin which made Goody, who translated Naangmin as 'head ngmin', question the uniqueness of the former. Conversely, Kuukure argued that Naangmin, as 'self- sufficiency, all wealth, all richness, "all-fullness"', was merely God in the absolute sense of the word. Therefore, he argued, 'the existence of many spirits, that is ngmine (singular, ngmin), is believed along with the existence of God, and these spirits, ngmine, are no less real to the Dagaaba than God is real to them.... It can be granted that the proliferation of cults, a sort of 'liturgical polytheism', can obscure the ontological monotheism and confuse the observer and lead him to a too often preconceived conclusion in favour of polytheism'.

65 The belief of early converts in Christian behaviour and ideas was a result of the demonstrable efficacy of those practices rather than of any deeper understanding. McCoy himself commented on the fact that the LoDagaa 'simply believed' (Naameh, 1986: 213). Although the missionaries explained their successes, whether medical or meteorological, in terms of God, early converts saw the missionaries as the locus of the powers they witnessed. 'In the conversion process the attention was focused on the missionaries who demonstrated greater powers than the fetish priests and divinities, and not God, who is never thought of as the cause of sickness or drought' (Naameh, 1986: 199). Indeed, Paterot had noted much the same of the legends, which quickly emerged, claiming that the missionaries had descended from the sky, were white, spoke Dagaare, cured illnesses, and resurrected the dead (1953: 133). Just because the missionaries identified their God as Naangmin would not have immediately altered indigenous concepts of the position of god, but would merely have confirmed the understanding of the missionaries as a power in their own right, as Naangmin, 'being neither in time nor space ... could therefore never become an object of rejection in the ... experience of disaster' (Naameh, 1986: 202).

66 As Kusiele noted in his study of divination among the LoDagaa of Burkina Faso, 'la mentalitd de l'homme de la religion traditionelle, mentalite affronte a la foi chr6tienne, ni l'adhesion a Jesus-Christ que lui dictait sa foi, ni le vernie d'une certaine culture occidentale ne l'ont emport6 sur ses croyances traditionelle' (1973: 1).

67 The basis of Some's argument was that the term Naangmin was actually a compound word invented by the missionaries. Naa, meaning 'rich', 'king', or 'chief', was allied with the authentic term mwin to create a monotheistic structure over the lesser gods, spirits and ancestors whom the LoDagaa attempted to communicate with in their religious practices (Some, 1991: 40). Following Goody, Som6 asserted that mwin was not worshipped by the LoDagaa, had no role as supreme god, and was only a remote, albeit primary, element in LoDagaa cosmology. Without much more extensive evidence it is impossible to resolve conclusively the etymological doubts raised by Some, but the use of Naangmin by missionaries as a term of evangelisation, and, later, by indigenous priests as a term of equivalence, does raise suspicions. And certainly the early missionaries were responsible for inventing new terms. 'The Missionaries even coined new words out of the native language to replace some traditional religious names.' Bekye illustrated that the terms for heaven and hell used by contemporary LoDagaa Christians, tengvelaa ('good-land') and teng-faa ('bad land'), were inventions meant to displace terms from LoDagaa eschatology which the missionaries deemed superstitious, namely dopar ('land of the dead'), or kpime teng ('land of the ancestors'), and dazuge-vuu ('fire of wood'). (Bekye, 1991: 276-8; Kuukure, 1985: 121-9.)

One of the main sources of evidence which would cast doubt on Some's claim that Naangmin was a recent invention has been the research conducted on aphorisms, proverbs, and theophoric names among the LoDagaa of Burkina Faso, as well as Bekye's own analysis among the LoDagaa of Ghana. While several authors have pointed out that these theophoric names antedated missionary conquest, what they failed to demonstrate was that the name Naangmin, as opposed to ngmin, was not a recent invention. (Hien and H6bert, 1968/69: 566; Kusiele, 1973: 43; Somda, 1977: 17-26; Bekye, 1991: 154.) In all four accounts of theophoric names the two terms are readily conflated, and although Bekye admitted to the possible confusion between God and god/gods, he claimed that ngmin was most commonly used merely as an abbreviated form of Naangmin (Bekye, 1991: 153). Similarly, Hien and Hebert stated that 'Dieu se dit Namwin "Dieu le Roi" en dagara, mais en composition on dit presque toujours Mwin.' (Hien and H6bert, 1968/69: 566.) This not only further underlines Goody's observation about the lack of uniqueness of Naangmin, but also brings into question the existence of the latter term before the arrival of missionaries. Naangmin actually appears very

241




infrequently in theophoric names, with far greater preference being shown for the word ngmin. Whether the term Naangmin was invented or not does not in any way affect the pre-missionary existence of the term ngmin; it is quite clear not only from theophoric names, but also from the plethora of theophoric sayings, that the name of god was often invoked. Ubah (1982: 93) noted much the same phenomenon among the Igbo, but explained that this did not mean that they were theocentric or monotheistic. The fact that the term Naangmin does appear very often in contemporary speech, but not as frequently as ngmin, and not in 'cultic language'-which presumably is less susceptible to change-is also suggestive, although still inconclusive (Bekye, 1991: 136).

68 Inculturation not only provided the indigenous clergy with the opportunity of assuming some degree of cultural sovereignty, as well as a means of revitalising their congregations, it also created the circumstances for the appropriation of practices once forbidden by the missionaries. There were strong suggestions in the later 1980s that although conversion had occasioned a strong change in behaviour, it had still not been matched by a similar alteration of religious thought on the part of converts after two generations of evangelical work (Naameh, 1986: 255). Indigenous culture had still not been renounced at the cognitive level. According to Naameh, there was strong adherence to indigenous beliefs on the part of converts which their Christian behaviour disguised: 'the statues of saints, crosses, etc., which they abundantly kept in their homes offered a more powerful replacement and satisfied the same emotional needs of security which their fetishes provided' (p. 245). Under these circumstances, inculturation acted as a defence not only of indigenous culture, but also of the Christian culture of LoDagaa converts. The mediumistic arguments of all observers of contemporary LoDagaa religion, while ostensibly addressing the question of the place of indigenous agencies within Christian worship, were also addressing the meaning of aspects of the Christian liturgy among their converts (Bekye, 1991: 17). Mediumistic interpretations not only defended indigenous culture, but, more important, the de facto hybrid of Christian practices and indigenous beliefs which was at the core of many Christian experiences among the LoDagaa.

69 By appealing to the past, societies such as the Dagomba, the Lozi, and the Shambaa have sought a new locus for lost sovereignty, which had been appropriated by foreigners and therefore resided outside their societies. (Staniland, 1975: 76-7; Prins, 1980: 28-9; Feierman, 1990: 144-5). The unprecedented nature of chieftaincy among the LoDagaa has made similar efforts less convincing or successful. For the LoDagaa, the lack of an appropriate past out of which chiefly traditions can be fashioned resulted in the inability to regain, albeit in a different form, lost sovereignty. In the absence of such a history, real or imaginable, power resides with external agencies which act as the arbiters of 'traditional' legitimacy, i.e. local authority.

70 The former has recently argued that the term 'tradition', although often greatly misused as 'a flag of convenience to legitimate a position held on other grounds', is still valid. For Vansina tradition is not a form of historical consciousness, and, therefore, presumably not susceptible to historicity; instead, traditions or 'fundamental continuities' determine ('shape') history. 'They are phenomena with their own characteristics. They are "out there".' (Vansina, 1990: 258.) But while this approach has the advantage of ignoring the primacy of historical consciousness where traditions can be invented or 'imagined', it does seem to lend itself to the notion of cultural determinism (Ranger, 1993a: 75-7, 80). This is very evident in mediumistic representations of LoDagaa beliefs which speak of realities beyond either the intention or the consciousness of believers themselves.

71 Although Bekye and Kuukure were reluctant to admit the mutability of non-Christian ideas, they both conceded that converts had not rejected 'traditional religious beliefs and customs' or 'the primal world views' (Kuukure, 1985: 18; Bekye, 1991: 17). Kuukure suggested that only the external forms of LoDagaa religion were in decline, that its 'attitudes' and 'world outlook' remained intact. Bekye argued that the transition between the traditional and the modern or Western-'for the two terms are interchangeable in this context,'-was incomplete. 'Western-style progress, or foreign religious propaganda, for all their impact or influence, have often been nothing more than an overlay on the traditional culture, with effects, sometimes, only of a superficial modification of the latter' (Bekye, 1991: 17). What both authors seemed to deny was the possibility of bilateral syncretism. While they conceded that conversion might not be complete, they did not entertain the idea that the process might actually have led to modifications of 'tradition'. The authors avoided direct mention of the LoDagaa in these remarks, nor did they make explicit reference to this phenomenon of syncretism or pluralism elsewhere, but they were obviously referring to the LoDagaa. This

242




circumspection is revealing: to admit to the incompleteness of conversion in theory is one thing; to document it in practice, another.

REFERENCES

National Archives of Ghana. [NAG ADM] Regional Archives, Tamale. [RAT ADM ] Rapports Annuels. [RA] Algiers: Societe des missionaires d'Afrique.

Afigbo, A. E. 1972. The Warrant Chiefs: indirect rule in southeastern Nigeria, 1891-1929. London: Longman.

Angsotinge, G. T. 1986. 'Wisdom of the Ancestors: an analysis of the oral narratives of the Dagaaba of Northern Ghana.' Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.

Arhin, K. 1974. The Papers of George Ekem Ferguson: a Fanti official of the government of the Gold Coast, 1890-97. Leiden and Cambridge: African Studies Centre.

Bekye, P. K. 1991. Divine Revelation and Traditional Religions: with particular reference to the Dagaaba of West Africa. Rome: Leberit Press.

Bongvlaa, R. 1979. 'Interview [by Father A. Bayo] with Robert Bongvlaa (catechist)', in Father V. Gregoire (ed.), That they may have Light: an account of the activities of the Church in north-west Ghana, 1929-79. Wa: Catholic Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chanock, M. 1985. Law, Custom and Social Order: the colonial experience in Malawi and Zambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cohen, D. W. 1989. 'The undefining of oral tradition', Ethnohistory 36 (1), 9-18. Dabire, C. G. 1983. 'L'Homme comme relation'. Ph.D. thesis, Quebec: Universitd

Laval. Davis, D. C. 1987. '"Then the white man came with his whitish ideas . . .": the

British and the evolution of traditional government in Mampurugu', Interna- tional Journal of African Historical Studies 20 (4), 627-46.

Der, B. 1974. 'Church-state relations in northern Ghana, 1906-40', Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 15, 41-61.

-1980. 'God and sacrifice in the traditional religions of the Kasena and Dagaba of northern Ghana', Journal of Religion in Africa (11 (3), 172-87.

-1983. 'Mission Enterprise in Northern Ghana. 1906-75: a study in impact'. Ph.D. thesis, University of Ghana, Legon.

-1989. 'The origins of the Dagara-Dagaba', Papers in Dagara Studies 1 (1), 1-25.

Dorward, D. C. 1974. 'Ethnography and administration: a study of Anglo-Tiv "working misunderstanding" ', Journal of African History 15 (3), 457-77.

Eliade, M. 1963. Aspects du mythe. Paris: Gallimard. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: how anthropology makes its object. New York:

Columbia University Press. Feierman, S. 1990. Peasant Intellectuals: anthropology and history in Tanzania.

Madison, Wi. University of Wisconsin Press. Fisher, H. J. 1985. 'The juggernaut's apologia: conversion to Islam in Black Africa',

Africa 55 (2), 153-73. Germain, R. 1937. 'Impressons d'un nouveau-venu', Les Missions d'Afrique, Quebec

33 (3), 80-9. Girault, L. 1959. 'Essai sur le religion Dagara', Bulletin de l'Institut francais

d'Afrique noire 21, 329-56. Goldschmidt, J. E. 1981. 'National and Indigenous Constitutional Law in Ghana:

243




their development and their relation to each other', Ph.D. thesis, University of Leiden.

Goody, J. 1956. The Social Organisation of the LoWiili. London: HMSO. -1957. 'Fields of social control among the LoDagaa', Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute 87, 75-104. -1962. Death Property and the Ancestors: a study of the mortuary customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press.

-1967. Preface to second edition, in The Social Organisation of the LoWiili, second edition. London: Oxford University Press.

-1972. The Myth of the Bagre. Oxford: Clarendon Press. -1975. 'Religion, social change and the sociology of conversion', in J. Goody

(ed.), Changing Social Structure in Ghana: essays in the comparative sociology of a new state and an old tradition. London: International African Institute.

Goody, J., and Gandah, S. W. D. K. 1980. Une Recitation du Bagre. Paris: Armand Colin.

Hawkins, S. 1989. 'A Study of Law and Marriage among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana, 1907-84', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge.

-Forthcoming. 'To pray or not to pray: politics, medicine, and conversion among the LoDagaa of northern Ghana, 1929-39', Canadian Journal of African Studies.

Hebert, P., et al. 1975. Esquisse d'une monographie historique du pays Dagara. Diebougou: Diocese de Diebougou.

Heehs, P. 1994. 'Myth, history, and theory', History and Theory 33 (1), 1-19. Henige, D. 1974. The Chronology of Oral Tradition: quest for a chimera. Oxford:

Oxford University Press. Hien, V. M., and Hebert, J. 1968/69. 'Pr6noms th6ophores en pays dagara',

Anthropos 63/64, 566-71. Hobsbawm, E. 1983. 'Introduction. Inventing tradition', in E. Hobsbawm and T. O.

Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E., and Ranger, T. O. (eds.). 1983. The Invention of Tradition.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holden, J. 1965. 'The Zabarima conquest of north-west Ghana', Transactions of the

Historical Society of Ghana 8, 60-86. Horton, R. 1971. African conversion', Africa 41 (2), 85-108. - 1993a. 'A definition of religion, and its uses', in R. Horton, Patterns of Thought

in Africa and the West: essays on magic, religion and science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

-1993b. 'Judaeo-Christian spectacles: boon or bane to the study of African religions?' in R. Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: essays on magic, religion and science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Iliffe, J. 1979. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jewsiewicki, B., and Mudimbe, V. Y. 1993. 'Africans' memories and contemporary African history', History and Theory 32 (4), 1-11.

Johnson, D. 1986. 'Judicial regulation and administrative control: customary law and the Nuer, 1898-1954', Journal of African History 27 (1), 59-78.

Kpiebaya, G. E. 1976. 'L'Africanisation de l'Eglise: qu'est-ce a dire?' Petit Echo 9, 493-8.

-1991. Dagaaba Traditional Marriage and Family Life. Wa: Catholic Press. Kuklick, H. 1991. The Savage Within: the social history of British anthropology,

1885-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kusiele, S. R. B. 1973. 'Systeme de la divination et conceptions religieuses chez les

Dagara', Savanes et forets 10/11, 1-58.

244




Kuukure, E. 1985. The Destiny of Man: Dagaare beliefs in dialogue with Christian eschatology. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Labouret, H. 1931. Les Tribus du rameau lobi. Paris: Universit6 de Paris. Ladouceur, P. 1979. Chiefs and Politicians: the politics of regionalism in northern

Ghana. London: Longman. Lentz, C. 1993. 'Histories and political conflict: a case study of chieftaincy in

Nandom, northwestern Ghana', Paideuma 39, 177-215. MacGaffey, W. 1970. Custom and Government in the Lower Congo. Berkeley, Ca.:

University of California Press. McCoy, R. F. 1988. Great Things Happen: a personal memoir of the first Christian

missionary among the Dagaabas and Sissalas of northwest Ghana. Montreal: Society of the Missionaries of Africa.

Mendonsa, E. 1982. The Politics of Divination: a processual view of illness and deviance among the Sisala of northern Ghana. Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press.

Mensah-Brown, A. K. 1969. 'Chiefs and the law in Ghana', Journal of African Law 13, 57-63.

Moore, S. F. 1986. Social Facts and Fabrications: 'customary' law on Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morin, 0. 1909. 'Les Gourounsi', Les Missions d'Afrique' Quebec, 5 (4) 264-70. Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of

knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Naameh, P. 1986. 'The Christianization of the Dagara within the Horizon of the

West European Experience'. Ph.D. thesis, Miinster: Westfaliache Wilhelms- Universitat.

Paternot, M. 1953. Lumiere sur la Volta, chez les Dagara. Paris: Association des Missionaries d'Afrique.

Peel, J. D. Y. 1994. 'Historicity and pluralism in some recent studies of Yoruba religion', Africa 64 (1), 150-66.

Person, Y. 1975. Samori: une revolution dyula 3. Dakar: Institut franqais d'Afrique noire.

Prins, G. 1980. The Hidden Hippopotamus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranger, T. 1983. 'The invention of tradition in colonial Africa', In E. Hobsbawm and

T. O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

-1993a. 'The invention of tradition revisited: the case of colonial Africa', in T. Ranger and 0. Vaughan (eds.), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

-1993b. 'The local and the global in southern African religious history', in R. W. Hefner (ed.), Conversion to Christianity: historical and anthropological perspectives on a great transformation. Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press.

Rattray, R. S. 1932. The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland. London: Oxford University Press.

Schott, R. 1985. 'A case of living law: traditional and moder jurisdiction among the Bulsa of northern Ghana', Quaderni Fiorentini 14, 149-72.

Shorter, A. 1988. Toward a Theology oflnculturation. Maryknoll, NY.: Orbis Books. Somda, M. J. B. 1977. Sagesse dagara I, Anthroponymie dagara. Koumi: Grand

seminaire. Somda, N. C. 1989. 'Les origines des Dagara', Papers in Dagara Studies 1 (1),

26-45. Some, A.-P. 1992. Signifiant et societe: le cas du dagara du Burkina Faso. Paris:

1'Harmattan.

245




Some, B. 1969. 'Organisation politico-sociale traditionelle des Dagara', Notes et documents voltaiques 2, 16-41.

Some, R. 1991. 'La conception dagara de dieu en question', Papers in Dagara Studies 1 (3), 30-43.

Staniland, Martin. 1975. The Lions of Dagbon: political change in northern Ghana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steiner, C. 1994. African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stock, B. 1990. Listening for the Text: on the uses of the past. Baltimore, Md.: Johns

Hopkins University Press. Tuurey, G. 1982. An Introduction to the Mole-speaking Community. Wa: Ghana

Education Service. Ubah, C. N. 1982. 'The supreme being, divinities and ancestors in Igbo traditional

religion: evidence from Otanchara and Otanzu', Africa 52 (2), 90-105. Ukpong, J. S. 1983. 'The problem of God and sacrifice in African traditional

religion', Journal of Religion in Africa 15 (3), 187-203. Vail, L. (ed.). 1989. The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. London: James

Currey. Vansina, J. 1990. Paths in the Rainforest: toward a history of political tradition in

equatorial Africa. Madison, Wi.: University of Wisconsin Press. - 1994. Living with Africa. Madison, Wi.: University of Wisconsin Press.

Wilks, Ivor. 1989. Wa and the Wala: Islam and polity in northwestern Ghana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, G., and Wilson, M. 1945. The Analysis of Social Change in Africa: based on observations in central Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yelpaala, K. 1983. 'Circular arguments and self-fulfilling definitions: "statelessness" and the Dagaaba', History in Africa 10, 349-85.

ABSTRACT

This article examines two periods in the historiography and ethnography of the LoDagaa of northern Ghana and analyses the similarities between them. In the late 1920s the institution of chieftaincy was written into LoDagaa history by colonial administrators, only two decades after they themselves had created that institution in a society they had once considered bereft of political authority. By the early 1930s colonial administrators had created a historical fiction, namely that chiefs had always existed among the LoDagaa, despite the view of a generation of earlier officers that there had been no chiefs prior to the arrival of the British. Administrators needed to finesse the past, not to convince the LoDagaa of the legitimacy of the chiefs, but in order to continue ruling through chiefs once indirect rule had been introduced. Colonial political engineering had to be indigenised in order to survive under the terms of indirect rule. This finessing of the past has bequeathed ambiguities and contradictions evident in contemporary attitudes toward the position of chiefs among the LoDagaa.

Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s the indigenous clergy among the LoDagaa, who had taken over from the missionaries in the 1960s, began to reassess the nature of god in indigenous religious thought in order to narrow the distance between LoDagaa culture and Catholicism. The idea of inculturation, which grew after the Second Vatican Council, was the specific impetus for such enquiries. LoDagaa priests re- examined indigenous religion and discovered the existence of belief in and worship of a single, absolute deity which had been neglected by earlier missionaries and ethnographers. The latter had argued that there was only a diffuse or otiose notion of an absolute god in LoDagaa culture and thought. The once otiose god was repatriated, as if it had been exiled by earlier observers, in ways and circumstances

246




similar to the invention of chieftaincy as an indigenous pre-colonial reality. While earlier political revisions were finessed by colonial officers, with the acquiescence of colonial chiefs, bent on changing LoDagaa culture and history for administrative convenience, the latter revisionists were seemingly concerned with defending and preserving indigenous culture rather than changing it. However, the notion of the pre-missionary worship of god is as much a historical fiction as the idea of the existence of chiefs in the pre-colonial period.

RESUME

Cet article examine deux periodes dans l'historiographie et l'ethnograhie des LoDagaa du nord du Ghana et analyse les similarites entre ces deux periodes. A la fin des annees 20, l'institution de chef de clan a ete ecrit dans l'histoire des LoDagaa par les administrateurs coloniaux, seulement deux decennies apres qu'ils aient eux- memes cree cette institution dans une societe qu'ils avaient une fois considere comme etant deprivee d'autorite politique. Au debut des annees 30, les administrateurs coloniaux ont cree une fiction historique, a savoir que les chefs avaient toujours existe parmi les LoDagaa, malgre l'opinion des premiers officiers, qui etaient de l'avis qu'il n'y avait pas eu de chefs avant l'arrivee des Britanniques. Les administrateurs avaient besoin de finasser avec le passe non pas afin de convaincre les LoDagaa de la legitimite des chefs, mais afin de continuer a gouverner par l'intermediaire des chefs une fois que le pouvoir indirect avait ete introduit. Les manoeuvres politiques coloniales avaient ete rendues indigenes afin de survivre sous les termes du pouvoir indirect. Le finassement du passe a legue des ambiguites et contradictions qui sont evidentes dans les attitudes contemporaines envers la position des chefs parmi les LoDagaa.

Parallelement, dans les annees 70 et 80 le clerge indigene parmi les LoDagaa, qui avait remplace les missonaires qui lui avait precede dans les annees 60, commenqa a reexaminer la nature de Dieu dans la pensee religieuse indigene afin de retrecir la distance entre la culture des LoDagaa et le catholisme. L'idee d'acculturation qui s'etait developpee apres le deuxieme Conseil du Vatican fut a la base de cette demarche. Les pretres LoDagaa ont reexamine la religion indigene et decouvert l'existence d'une croyance en une divinite unique et de sa veneration, qui avait ete negligee par les premiers missionaires et ethnographes. Ces derniers avaient soutenu qu'il n'y avait qu'une notion diffuse et inutile d'un Dieu absolu dans la culture et pensees des LoDagaa.

Le Dieu qui avait ete auparavant inutile fut repatrie, comme s'il avait ete exi$e par des premiers observateurs d'une maniere et dans des circonstances similaires a l'invention des chefs en tant que realite pre-coloniale. Tandis que des revisions politiques ulterieures etaient faites par des officiers coloniaux, avec le consentement de leurs chefs coloniaux, inclines a changer la culture et l'histoire des LoDagaa par souci de commodite administrative, les revisionistes d'apres etaient apparemment plus incline a defendre et preserver la culture indigene plut6t que de la changer. Cependant, la notion du culte de Dieu comme ayant existe avant les missionaires est autant une fiction historique que l'idee de l'existence des chefs dans la periode pre- coloniale.

247



Documents

Disguising Chiefs and God as History: Questions on the Acephalousness of Lodagaa Politics and Religion