‘Neither fish nor fowl’: an analysis of status ambiguity of the Houses of Chiefs in Ghana
This article sets out to explain the basis of status ambiguity of the Houses of Chiefs and Traditional Councils in Ghana and the implications of this ambiguity on the status of the administrative personnel working in them. The interest was necessitated by complaints from administrative personnel in the Houses of Chiefs who were excluded from the general salary enhancement to all civil servants in Ghana in 2007. Between 2007 and 2009, research was conducted in all the 10 Regional Houses of Chiefs, in the National House of Chiefs and at the Ministry of Chieftaincy and Culture (MCC). While interviews were the main methods used at the MCC, it was combined with observations at the Houses of Chiefs. Primary and secondary documents were also consulted in the process. Data revealed that the Houses of Chiefs serve as “customary” courts for chieftaincy disputes and over the years, have incorporated certain practices of the English common law into their proceedings. Thus, they are neither customary courts in the strictest sense, nor common law courts, which equally explains the difficulty in determining whether or not the administrative personnel in these Houses are civil servants.
Customary Law in the New African States
Among the long list of intractable problems faced by the new independent states of Africa, by no means the least severe is that of creating national legal systems out of the welter of indigenous and introduced bodies of law with which they come to independence. Bodies of customary law have survived, and in some cases have even been strengthened, during the period of colonial administration; European and, in some instances, Near Eastern and Asian elements have been added to the potpourri. As members of the various communities to which these diverse bodies of law apply increasingly marry, contract with, and rob one another, the potentiality for conflict of laws is enormous. In relatively few cases have satisfactory means of reconciling them been developed. This legal pluralism is, of course, merely the legal aspect of the general cultural fragmentation which is so characteristic of the new African states. Consisting of congeries of traditional polities-some tiny clusters of a few villages, others great kingdoms numbering their subjects in the millions-thrown together by European diplomacy in the nineteenth century, the new states have little common culture to unite them. Over large areas of Asia and the Near East, and Muslim North Africa as well, otherwise diverse peoples are given a measure of unity-including sometimes unity of law-by the influence of the great multi-ethnic "world religions": Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, however, lack such bases for common loyalty and identification. To be sure, there is over large areas a great deal of similarity of culture and language. For example, by far the larger part of the continent south of the Sudan belt is populated by speakers of Bantu and related languages whose historical differentiation, linguists tell us, is very recent-perhaps a matter of only a very few thousand years.' But, not being embodied in an elite literary tradition which might have articulated and concretized them, these elements of common culture have little unifying influence to contribute to the new states. Before the establishment of colonial rule, the thousands of distinct African polities confronted one another as autonomous and often hostile entities; to a great extent, they still do. Such unity as the sub-Saharan states possess today is in large part a product of the colonial experience-of the common Western education of the elites and of the common reaction against colonial rule and against the centuries of slavery which preceded it. This unity, however, is both a doubtful and wasting asset: doubtful
The first ground cricket (Orthoptera: Trigonidiidae: Nemobiinae) from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber
Abstract A new genus and species, Birmaninemobius hirsutus gen. et sp. nov., is described on the basis of a well-preserved orthopteran specimen in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber and attributed to the subfamily Nemobiinae (ground crickets) of the family Trigonidiidae (Grylloidea). As the first record of Nemobiinae from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, this new taxon not only provides novel morphological diversity in ground crickets but also indicates that the ground crickets lived in Burma (Tethyan islands) as early as the mid-Cretaceous.