The Historical and Political Legacies of the Tranformations of the (Dutch) Sekondi Socio‑Economic Landscape During the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 11 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2010 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 7 THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL LEGACIES OF THE TRANFORMATIONS OF THE (DUTCH) SEKONDI SOCIO‑ECONOMIC LANDSCAPE DURING THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY1 GIANCARLO PICHILLO Synopsis, or the Story Behind a Missing Object This paper is in some ways the outcome of an “accident,” as it frequently happens when one is engaged in ethnographic fieldwork. The initial objective of my enquiry in Sekondi was not the history and the logic of political disputes for succession to the highest local stool office. Rather my research focused on the “traditional” annual harvest festival, the Kundum, which constitutes a public political arena where local identity—the sense of belonging to the cultural community of the Ahanta2 —is periodically reshaped 1. A draft of the present paper was presented at the Third AEGIS-ECAS Conference in Leipzig, Respacing Africa, on a panel organized by Prof. Dennis Laumann: New Researches in Ghanaian Colonial History. I am grateful to Prof. Laumann for his patience, support, and critical suggestions before, during, and after the conference. The article also benefited from careful readings by Prof. Mariano Pavanello, Dr. Stefano Boni, and Dr. Tommaso Sbriccoli, to whom I express my debt. Warm thanks to Nana Yadae Kojo IV, chief of Mimptsim and gyaasehene of the Sekondi Traditional Council, and to Nana Kobina Nketsia V, omanhene of Essikado and historian at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. I would like to thank Prof. Armando Cutolo and his colleagues of the Ph.D. program in anthropology, ethnology, and cultural studies at the University of Siena. Finally, special thanks must be paid to the reviewer, Prof. Larry Yarak, and to Prof. Stephan Miescher for editing the manuscript. Obviously, the responsibility for the interpretation of present and historical facts regarding the Dutch Sekondi stool rests with me. 2. Sekondi people belong to the Akan ethnic group, of which they constitute a subgroup called Ahanta. Ahantas and Akan share the same political structure and social 8 Ghana Studies • volume 11 • 2010 by the rituals and the mundane activities of the eight-day cycle of Kundum. The latter, however, is also constituted by a “sacred” sphere, which reveals itself in the rituals that acknowledge the bonds between the world of the living and that of the ancestors. It is in this sense that the chiefs’ centrality within the celebration of the ritual activities must be understood. The chief, the custodian of his (or her) stool, acts as the personification of the continuity of the community, which he represents and rules.3 The Kundum festival, however, is above all a political affair, in which the authority of the local chief is recognised, or contested, within a social field that comprises other actors, such as the state and its politicians, foreign investors, civic associations, as well as international and national non-­governmental organizations.4 The people of Sekondi usually celebrate organisation: both are matrilineal with regards to the succession to chiefly offices. The people of (Dutch) Sekondi, though Fanti speaking, still regard themselves Ahanta, because of the political history of the territory they inhabit. Until the first half of the nineteenth century, they were subjected to the authority of the Ahanta royal stool of Busua, occupied by an Anona, or Agona, lineage called Obuneto by the current family members. In a rhetoric fashion, the Busua stool, represented by the dynasty of Baidoo Bonsoe, still claims its political hegemony over Ahanta by declaring that its power stretches from the Prah to the Ankobra rivers (although the “British” stools of Essikado, Upper and Lower Dixcove assert their historical independency from Busua). The Ahantas call themselves arhendamaa, but they also stress their cultural closeness with their western neighbours, the Nzema. The world nda means “twins” in the local language, stressing the links with the nzema cultural world. According to my informants, the name of the local language was Agnenle, a variant of the Agninli (agni). Arhendaa is also the original name of the Ahanta territory, later corrupted into “Ahanta.” Linguistics shows that the Agni dialect derives from the Bia language, that is, together with the Akan language, the main...