Colonialism In Northern Ghana Research Articles

Tax collection in Northern Ghana during British Colonial Rule from 1898-1950 (Part Two)

One aspect of administrative history that was bequeathed by British colonialism in Northern Ghana from 1898 to 1950 was that of tax collection. This came in two phases: the first commenced from 1898 to1930. This study is concerned with the second period that lasted from 1930 to 1950. Within this period the purpose or objective of the study argues that a clear tax policy was formulated for Northern Ghana which marked the re-introduction of direct taxation that was systematically imposed under a system of Native Administration based on the principles of indirect rule. Much archival material was obtained in the Public Records and Archival Administration Department both in Accra and Tamale. Oral interviews were carried out that engaged elderly people who hail from the North. Information was equally gathered from chiefs and educated elites who come from the area. Some of the latter are teachers in universities in Ghana. Secondary source material such as books and journals enhanced the study. Thorough preparations were made by the British regime towards the re-introduction of direct taxation culminating in its return. The study outlines the nature and method of collection, the expenditure that was entailed, and the social effects that direct taxation bestowed on the traditional social life of the inhabitants. The article concludes that tax collection in Northern Ghana was thus one of the most successful policies that was carried out by the British and that actual developments resulting in the provision of social infrastructure began with the re-introduction of direct taxation under the Native Administration systemKeywords: Native Administration, Customary Tribute, Nominal Rolls, Native Authorities, Metal Discs

Colonial Conflicts in Contemporary Northern Ghana: A Historical Prognosis of the British Colonial Factor in the Nawuri-Gonja and Mamprusi-Kusasi Conflicts

Northern Ghana has witnessed phenomenal increases in armed conflicts over the past three decades. Many of these conflicts are ‘colonial conflicts’ rooted in colonial policies, but some others have no reference to colonialism as they are occasioned by endogenous factors. The Kusasi-Mamprusi and Nawuri-Gonja conflicts are colonial conflicts whose historical roots are traceable to colonialism in Northern Ghana. This paper interrogates the British-sponsored political conferences held prior to the introduction of indirect rule in Northern Ghana, with special focus on the Mamprusi and Gonja conferences. The paper argues that the conferences sowed the seeds of the post-colonial MamprusiKusasi and Gonja-Nawuri conflicts.

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the 'World of Paper' (review)

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the 'World of Paper' (review)

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the "World on Paper.":Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the "World on Paper."

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the "World on Paper.":Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the "World on Paper."

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the “World on Paper.”

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the “World on Paper.” Sean Hawkins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 468 pp.

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and "The World on Paper"

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and "The World on Paper"

<sc>Sean Hawkins</sc>. <italic>Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and “the World on Paper</italic>.” (Anthropological Horizons, number 18.) Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 468

<sc>Sean Hawkins</sc>. <italic>Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and “the World on Paper</italic>.” (Anthropological Horizons, number 18.) Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 468

Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: "How to Play the Game of Life"

Stephanie Newell. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: How to Play the Game of Life.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. x + 242 pp. Tables. Plates. Bibliography. Index. $22.95. Paper. Sean Hawkins. Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: Encounter between the LoDagaa and The World on Paper.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. xv + 468 pp. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $80.00. Cloth. Here are two well-written, intellectually exciting, and empirically informative studies on the making of the colonial Stephanie Newell, a lecturer in the Department of English, Trinity College, Dublin, examines education, literacy, English language literary culture, literary texts, and the formation of English language readerships in the colonial Gold Coast between 1880 and 1940. She analyzes the status conferred by English-language writing and literacy as well as the varied roles of print culture. Sean Hawkins, an associate professor in the Department of History, University of Toronto, reexamines the cultural and historical meaning of colonialism. he does so by analyzing it as a power relationship between a dominant on paper-a world of writing, rules, and a linear concept of history-and a subordinate of experience-a world of knowledge, practice, and speech. LoDagaa of the Northern Protectorate of the Gold Coast Colony and, later, the Northern Region of Ghana exemplify the of experience. External authorities-British colonial administrators and postcolonial Ghanaian administrators and missionaries-exemplify the on paper. He does not limit his study to the administrative practices of the colonial state but includes those of the postcolonial nationstate of Ghana. Newell raises two fundamental questions: What did the colonized read and how did they read? Colonized does not refer exclusively to modernizing elites but also to those she calls most of whom, it should be said, were town-dwellers. Her sustained discussion of readers and readerships offers insight into the creation of what can be called interpretive communities (to use Stanley Fish's term) and a literary marketplace. In the introduction she looks at the formation of readerships in the Gold Coast through a study of Christian missions, bookshops, bibliophiles, and libraries. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the development of reading, literary clubs, and debating societies and to the impact of interwar and postwar nationalism on readerships. Chapter 2 addresses the issue of male and female readerships and the gendered (masculinized) nature of historical readership and of what constituted the literary. Chapter 3 uncovers the emergence of writings concerned with representing authentic African settings in local vernaculars following the colonial government's decision in the 1920s to discard its literary syllabus for the first three years of primary school in favor of African-oriented texts written in local languages. Chapters 4-9 turn to the content of reading. What constituted good reading for Africans was of concern to missionaries and colonial administrators alike. Newell devotes an entire chapter to the writings of Marie Corelli, a Victorian novelist who was highly popular in British West Africa in the 1920s but much vilified in British literary circles. In succeeding chapters she analyzes the writings and readership of Mabel Dove, Kobina Sekyi, J. E. Casely Hayford, and R. E. Obeng, who wrote Ghana's earliest English-language novel in 1943. Curiously, Newell says nothing about the intellectual property rights of the authors in the colonial context, but her study recounts other unexamined aspects of colonial literary culture. She displays a fine talent for extracting the hidden transcripts, discursive economy, and cultural meanings of ostensibly ordinary readers. Through a careful weaving of intellectual, literary, cultural, and social histories, she successfully restores ordinary readers, their texts and practices, and their networks to the historical record. …

Reviews of Books:Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and "The World on Paper" Sean Hawkins

Reviews of Books:Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and "The World on Paper" Sean Hawkins

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the 'World on Paper' (review)

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and the 'World on Paper' (review)

Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850-1940 (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 Derek R. Peterson Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940. By Christopher Gray. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002. The cultural and political history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Africa is being composed as a history of colonial encounters. Sandra Greene’s recently published Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) explores how the landscaping of colonialism reworked Anlo people’s conceptions of sacred space. Sean Hawkins’ Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and “the World on Paper” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) illuminates how colonial courts and British anthropology reduced the negotiable LoDagaa “world of experience” to a set of rules on paper. Christopher Gray’s study partakes of this academic discourse on the colonial encounter. In the second half of the nineteenth century, says Gray, “two very different cognitive maps confronted each other in Southern Gabon” (2). The diverse people who lived south of the Ogooué river practiced a social definition of territory: their political order rested on the control over people, not on the control over geographic space. French colonialism sought to anchor people, as members of ethnic groups, to specific tracts of land, the better to govern them. In the early twentieth century, the precolonial order was destroyed, as French colonists used censuses, maps, labor camps, and roads to rearrange people according to an administrative logic. But elements of the precolonial cognitive system survived, says Gray, making the legacies of colonial territoriality decidedly ambiguous. The strength of Gray’s book is his sensitive analysis of precolonial social order. The standard approach is to treat pre-colonial history schematically, as a static backdrop against which the effects of colonialism can be studied. Gray, in contrast, illuminates the flexible, dynamic nature of precolonial territoriality. While patrilocal villages were the basic unit of residence, matrilineal clans drew people from disparate regions together as descendants of a common female ancestor. Political communities, therefore, were socially defined: they revolved around kinship rather than residence. Districts were the largest political units that people recognized. Organized around trading routes, rivers, or ecological zones, districts were flexible alliances of villages and clans, brought together by intermarriage and sharing a commitment to self-defense. Gray is emphatic that nothing about this precolonial social order revolved around ethnicity. Speakers of different languages lived alongside one another, intermarried, and formed kinship alliances. In the latter half of the book, Gray documents how this social definition of territory was replaced by a territorial definition of society. Paul Du Chaillu, Savorgnan de Brazza, and other European explorers crisscrossed the region in the late nineteenth century, mapping rivers, streams, and mountains. Smallpox followed in their wake, killing tens of thousands of people. But more than demographic disaster, European exploration brought modern conceptions of territory to bear on the people of this region. Gray follows Mary Louise Pratt in noting how explorers appropriated space through their maps, emptying territory of its prior, unwritten significance. The Ogooué River, for example, was not known as a geographic feature before Europeans mapped it. Local people named rapids and pools, or categorized portions of the river as “upstream” or “downstream.” European observers, in contrast, applied concrete names to geographic features that their maps revealed. Colonial censuses similarly appropriated and transformed space. When French officials began counting people in the early twentieth century, they categorized them as members of ethnic groups, as “Eshira,” “Mitsogo,” or “Bapunu.” These ethnic categories were fabrications, products of the French imagination. But they took on real life, as administrators used invented categories to organize and govern people. Road building played a particularly important role in the colonial reorganization of social order. When the state first began to build roads in the 1910s, work gangs were organized on an ethnic basis, giving social form to fictional identities on paper. By the 1920s and 30s, the colonial army was routing people out of their rural homes to live in artificial villages beside new roads. Bound to the land, people could be taxed, policed...

Writing and colonialism in northern Ghana: the encounter between the LoDagaa and "the world on paper"

This book presents a new perspective on colonialism in Africa. Drawing on work from a variety of subjects and disciplines - from ancient Mediterranean to colonial Spain, and from anthropology to psychology - author argues that colonialism in Africa needs to be understood through medium of writing and particular world it belonged to. Focusing on LoDagaa of northern Ghana and their relationship with British colonialism, Hawkins describes colonialism as an encounter between a world of experience - a world of knowledge, practice, and speech - and the world on paper - a world of writing, rules, and a linear concept of history. The various ways in which the world on paper affected LoDagaa are examined thematically. The first four chapters explore how writing imposed a form of historical consciousness on different aspects of LoDagaa culture - identity, politics, and religion - that was alien to them. The second half of book examines how both British colonial state and its postcolonial successor, Ghanian state, attempted to regulate indigenous forms of knowledge, gender relations, and social reckoning through courts. This ambitious and richly detailed book will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in African history, British colonialism, and cultural and postcolonial studies.