Of Hunters, Goats and Earth-Shrines: Settlement Histories and the Politics of Oral Tradition in Northern Ghana

Abstract

The present paper deals with the settlement history of a West African agricultural society, that of the Dagara in present-day northwestern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso. In it, I shall be particularly interested in the appropriation of space, which is ritually legitimized through the acquisition of earth-shrines, and in the conflict-ridden relationships between the in-migrating Dagara and the Sisala, who were already settled in their new habitat. My primary concern, however, is not to examine the Dagara's expansion strategies or the history of interethnic conflicts as such, but their working out in disputed oral traditions. Using the example of the controversial settlement history of Nandom (see map 1), I wish to show how Africans, both today and in the colonial past, have used oral traditions in order to conduct politics. I shall discuss the methodological implications that this mutual constitution of oral traditions and political interests has for the reconstruction of settlement history and examine the possibilities of a thorough criticism of sources to detect core elements of the historical settlement process and appropriation of space as well as the presentday confrontations with history. Oral traditions have played an important role in research into African history and societies. This is because in many places it was European missionaries and colonial masters who first introduced literacy and writing, and because we have only a few written sources—sometimes none at all—for the period up to the end of the nineteenth century.

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