Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa by Carola Lentz

Author:Carola Lentz [Lentz, Carola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, West, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780253009616
Google: stlYjKzEFT8C
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-07-05T01:41:54+00:00

Grounding Ethnic Belonging: The Colonial Creation of Chiefdoms and “Tribes”

Colonial domination, and particularly the introduction of chieftaincy, had a profound influence on mobility, ethnic relations, and land tenure. The colonial administration, working through a hierarchy of local chiefs, endeavored to restrict residential mobility in order to improve their control over labor resources and, in the French colony, poll-tax collection. In addition, the gradual imposition of the pax colonia largely curbed the recourse to violence and thus changed the balance of power in favor of the Sisala (and other groups on whose territory the Dagara encroached). When the Dagara now established new settlements, they had to accept the ritual authority of the Sisala landowners and were no longer able to forcefully convert themselves into first-comers and thus acquire an allodial title. Furthermore, the colonial creation of chiefdoms and “tribes” contributed to the hardening of ethnic boundaries and the ethnicization of land rights.27

Early travelers and colonial administrators characterized the peoples north of the Wala kingdom by first of all pointing to the fact that they did not pay allegiance to any of the surrounding states.28 British officers noted repeatedly that in much of the Black Volta District (later renamed North-Western Province), “each compound is practically a law unto itself,”29 and complained about the “extremely independent nature” of the native(s) who “will owe no other authority beyond the head of his own family.”30 Their French counterparts west of the Black Volta, too, grumbled about the “complete anarchy” of the “Dagari.”31 Nonetheless, the colonial officers believed that every African belonged, from birth to death, to a particular “tribe” that was clearly distinct from all neighboring tribes in its physiological, linguistic, and cultural features. Particularly the British insisted that administrative boundaries should follow “tribal” boundaries as much as possible because the legitimacy of the chiefs, through whom the British (and French) wanted to administer their territories, was to be based on the ethnic identification that the chiefs shared with their subjects. In practice, however, the European administrators soon realized that both the unambiguous classification of the local population into clearly bounded ethnic categories and the creation of chiefdoms along ethnic lines were difficult tasks. Nonetheless, they remained convinced that mapping ethnic boundaries was not wholly impossible, and that, once the boundaries were discovered, they could eventually be transformed into the bases of the boundaries of the native states. Holding fast to this conviction, despite all evidence to the contrary, was part of the “working misunderstanding”32 between local actors and colonial administrators that did finally produce a new political landscape of “tribes” and apparently ethnically defined chiefdoms.

The colonial ethnic map partly ignored and partly made strategic use of the ambiguities of overlapping identities and fuzzy boundaries. Toponyms were redefined as ethnonyms and vice versa; the mobility of the population was disregarded, or conceptually watered-down as “intermingling”; and multiethnic settlements were redefined as monoethnic. Once established and fixed in writing, the colonial ethnic nomenclature proved quite enduring. This resulted partly from the self-referentiality of colonial reporting, and partly from the central significance accorded to the tribe as a model of political order.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.