Ethnic Land Rights in Western Ghana: Landlord–Stranger Relations in the Democratic Era

Abstract

In Citizen and Subject (1996), Mahmood Mamdani denounced the ‘bifurcated nature’ of the African state which, in his account, imposed ethnic hierarchy and chiefly despotism on rural dwellers while reserving democratic citizenship for the urban minority. Have twenty years of ‘decentralized democracy’ in many countries washed away these distinctions? This article takes up this issue in an analysis of the politics of land allocation and landlord–stranger relations in Western Ghana. An analysis of historical trajectories, and our own field observations and interviews in two Western Region districts, suggest that at the local level, the bifurcated character of political authority that was identified by Mamdani persists in the domain of economic rights. The record also shows that state policies and institutions, rather than working to chip away at ethnic hierarchy and chiefly authority, work at least in part to reproduce these features of the local political economy. In both non‐democratic and democratic eras, Ghana's central government has played an important role in shoring up chiefly and ethnic privilege in the land domain. These local hierarchies influence the practical meaning of democracy and economic liberalization for rural citizens, and should be explored more systematically in future studies of democratic and electoral politics in Ghana and elsewhere.

Playing the immigration card: the politics of exclusion in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana

“…Political parties in Ghana thus have avoided xenophobic discourse and even have courted the immigrant vote. This is consistent with survey findings that migration is not a 'political issue' (Mitchell, 2012b), even though there are frequent disputes between migrants and indigenes over land rights in various parts of the country (Boni, 2005;Boone & Duku, 2012;Mitchell, 2012b). Given Ghana's past history of immigrant expulsion and ongoing tensions over land, this strategy of politicians seeking immigrant support is all the more intriguing.…”

“…Instead, migrants typically entered into a sharecropping arrangement (abusa), farming in exchange for some of the harvest. Some migrants did manage to purchase plots in Western Region in the 1950s through the 1970s, but chiefs eventually reasserted control over land allocation there (Boone & Duku, 2012). Due in part to a different colonial experience (Boone, 2003b;MacLean, 2010), traditional chiefs in Ghana maintained significant control over land allocation and often exploited migrants (Woods, 2004), tipping the balance of power in favour of hosts (Mitchell, 2011).…”

Pastoralism and Land‐Tenure Change in Kenya: The Failure of Customary Institutions

“…While the way in which state intervention in formalization, such as in titling programmes, leads to conflicts and other dismal outcomes among pastoralists, such as the Maasai, has often been deplored (Galaty, ; Mwangi, ), it is important to point out that customary tenure systems have undesirable outcomes too. Women, for example, are often systematically discriminated against regarding their rights to land (Khadiagala, ; Whitehead and Tsikata, ) and in Ghana, for instance, the arbitrariness of chiefly authority persists in customary land management (Boone and Duku, ; Ubink and Quan, ). Critics of formalization have further pointed out that titling may lead to distress‐prompted land sales by the poor, and be primarily beneficial to the elites (Kingwill et al., ).…”

Political Structure and the Limits of Recognition and Representation in Ghana

“…This contrasts with western Ghana, where government agency is the source of chiefs’ power; there, the government accepts tensions between local and national citizenship, and protects the authority of chiefs through intervention (Boone and Duku, : 690). Kpandai is different, lacking both obvious government intervention and an articulated implementation of differentiated citizenship.…”

“…This principle of separation, carried over from the colonial period, ensures that the demarcation of new secular districts is not permitted to undermine the jurisdictions of the government‐recognized traditional councils — the so‐called traditional areas. Here we see that the development of formal democratic institutions and the formalization of traditional institutions are significant features of political structure in Ghana (Boone and Duku, : 690). However, the increase in secular administrative demarcations in recent years has put pressure on traditional jurisdictions as boundaries overlap and new avenues of representation open up (Owusu, ).…”