No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Studies on migration have largely neglected the emergence of migrant chiefs in Africa’s urban centers. Chieftaincy analysis has also not been adequately extended to those who are migrants and how they are selected and installed as chiefs in the cities. Through deliberately-provoked conversations with Dagomba migrant chiefs and their elders, the paper undoubtedly extends the frontiers of both chieftaincy and migration studies bringing to the fore dynamics of Dagomba migrant chiefs and their changing roles in Ghana’s city of Accra. Reworking Blundo’s administrative brokers, this paper reveals how migrant chiefs in urban settings liaise with state institutions to help solve certain problems migrants encounter in the city. The paper concludes that other actors in the urban space, such as youth leaders around Members of Parliament coming from migrants’ home regions, could gradually take up the brokerage role in the city.

This paper focuses on the "naam" making processes-or the installation of chiefs and the investiture of the king-which has been neglected by scholars writing about the Dagbon chieftaincy in the Northern Region of Ghana. Rather, scholars have paid attention to the internal chieftaincy disputes that have bedeviled the kingdom for about a century now. Using content analysis and in-depth interviews with selected chiefs, their elders, kingmakers, and drum historians of the Dagomba in the Northern region of Ghana, this paper provides an analysis of king making as well as chief making process. The paper argues that whilst chieftaincy as an institution could be sociologically considered non-rational, successful "naam" making legitimates the chieftaincy institution enabling its actors (the chiefs) to interact with modern state institutions.