Walking For Land, Drinking Palm Wine:
Migrant Farmers and the Historicity of Land Conflict in Brong Ahafo,
Ghana
Isidore Lobnibe, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
lobnibe@uiuc.edu
This paper focuses on one aspect of
rural land migration in postcolonial Ghana, which has so far escaped
notice, the interest of the hosts in settling migrants in the current
climate of political and economic rivalry.
Rival chiefdoms and landowners in southern Ghana have employed landless
migrants from the north to promote and defend their stools’ interests
with regard to disputed land boundaries. The landlords often settle
migrants anticipating such conflicts and they train the migrant farmers
to whom they offer land to recount oral narratives in support of their
own account, to help substantiate their claims. This paper will explore
the dynamics of historical production in the context of contemporary
struggle over one colonially demarcated land boundary between two farming
communities in rural southern Ghana. Drawing on the colonial archive
and local oral narratives, the paper examines an age-old land conflict
between Chiraa and Wenchi in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana that was
allegedly settled in a walking contest between the two claimants in
the colonial period, but has since been subject to bitter dispute and
multiple interpretations. The paper demonstrates in detail how local
communities in this forest region of Ghana often resort to settling
migrants on disputed lands to support what they consider their “ historic” claims.
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