Different Ideas of Borders and Border Construction in Northern Ghana: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

Abstract

in distinct and lasting ways by the international and internal political boundaries that the European colonial powers defined. Borders and borderlands today represent important theoretical frameworks to analyse the processes of identity construction, changes in local political dynamics, and the nature of conflicts in contemporary Africa. Through close studies of African societies and their interactions with each other, particularly via anthropological research, it is clear that despite western conceptions of borders as fixed they have been and remain fluid, highly permeable, and shifting space markers. Indeed, in the absence of a local equivalent to their European understandings of and desire for boundaries and borders in African societies, colonial officials continuously faced conflicting conceptions of space. In this article, I reconstruct the British process of demarcating borders in the eastern part of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, the contemporary Northern Region of Ghana, during the first half of the twentieth century. I am particularly concerned with districts in which Konkomba, Nanumba and Dagomba predominated. Building from archival, ethnographic, and oral sources, I explore contemporary conceptions of borders and their