Disguising chiefs and God as history: questions on the acephalousness of LoDagaa politics and religion

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines two periods in the historiography and ethnography of the LoDagaa of northern Ghana and analyses the similarities between them. In the late 1920s the institution of chieftaincy was written into LoDagaa history by colonial administrators, only two decades after they themselves had created that institution in a society they had once considered bereft of political authority. By the early 1930s colonial administrators had created a historical fiction, namely that chiefs had always existed among the LoDagaa, despite the view of a generation of earlier officers that there had been no chiefs prior to the arrival of the British. Administrators needed to finesse the past, not to convince the LoDagaa of the legitimacy of the chiefs, but in order to continue ruling through chiefs once indirect rule had been introduced. Colonial political engineering had to be indigenised in order to survive under the terms of indirect rule. This finessing of the past has bequeathed ambiguities and contradictions evident in contemporary attitudes toward the position of chiefs among the LoDagaa.Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s the indigenous clergy among the LoDagaa, who had taken over from the missionaries in the 1960s, began to reassess the nature of god in indigenous religious thought in order to narrow the distance between LoDagaa culture and Catholicism. The idea of inculturation, which grew after the Second Vatican Council, was the specific impetus for such enquiries. LoDagaa priests reexamined indigenous religion and discovered the existence of belief in and worship of a single, absolute deity which had been neglected by earlier missionaries and ethnographers. The latter had argued that there was only a diffuse or otiose notion of an absolute god in LoDagaa culture and thought. The once otiose god was repatriated, as if it had been exiled by earlier observers, in ways and circumstances similar to the invention of chieftaincy as an indigenous pre-colonial reality. While earlier political revisions were finessed by colonial officers, with the acquiescence of colonial chiefs, bent on changing LoDagaa culture and history for administrative convenience, the latter revisionists were seemingly concerned with defending and preserving indigenous culture rather than changing it. However, the notion of the pre-missionary worship of god is as much a historical fiction as the idea of the existence of chiefs in the pre-colonial period.