‘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.
'Our traditions are modern, our modernities traditional': chieftaincy and democracy in contemporary Cameroon and Botswana
In this paper, I have argued that, instead of being pushed aside by the modern power elites – as was widely predicted both by modernisation theorists and their critics – chieftaincy has displayed remarkable dynamics and adaptability to new socio-economic and political developments, without becoming totally transformed in the process. Chiefdoms and chiefs have become active agents in the quest by the new elites for ethnic, cultural symbols as a way of maximising opportunities at the centre of bureaucratic and state power, and at the home village where control over land and labour often require both financial and symbolic capital. Chieftaincy, in other words, remains central to ongoing efforts at developing democracy and accountability in line with the expectations of Africans as individual ‘citizens’ and also as ‘subjects’ of various cultural communities. The paper uses Cameroon and Botswana as case studies, to argue that the rigidity and 1 I am grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for funding my research on Cameroon, and to the Research and Publications Committee of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Botswana, for funds to research chieftaincy in Botswana. An earlier version of this paper was published under a different title in The Dynamics of Power and the Rule of Law: Essays on Africa and Beyond (2003), edited by Wim van Binsbergen in collaboration with Riekje Pelgrim. I am grateful to them for comments and editorial assistance. I am equally grateful to Henning Melber, who guest-edited a special issue of Journal of Contemporary African Studies (vol.21(2), 2003), in which an earlier version of the section on Botswana was published, as well as to participants at the July 2004 University of Durham, UK, conference on ‘Traditional Accountability and Modern Governance in Africa’, where an earlier version of this paper was presented as a keynote with the title: ‘“Our Traditions are Modern, Our modernities traditional”: Chieftaincy and Democracy in Contemporary Africa’. Finally, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for the journal Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society, who suggested useful revisions, and to the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) for a fellowship (April – June 2015) that enabled me to undertake the revisions. Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society 2014 | Volume 2, Issue 2, pages 13–62 14 Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society | 2014 | Volume 2, Issue 2 prescriptiveness of modernist partial theories have left a major gap in scholarship on chiefs and chieftaincy in Africa. It stresses that studies of domesticated agency in Africa are sorely needed to capture the creative ongoing processes and to avoid overemphasising structures and essentialist perceptions on chieftaincy and the cultural communities that claim and are claimed by it. Scholarship that is impatient with the differences and diversities that empirical research highlights, runs the risk of pontification or orthodoxy. Such stunted or reductionist scholarship, like rigid notions of liberal democracy, is akin to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would rather trim a corpse than expand his/her coffin to accommodate a man-mountain, or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every problem is a nail.
Chieftaincy in Ghana
Chieftaincy in Ghana is an extensive account of the many roles of chiefs in modern society. A. Kodzo Paaku Kludze provides detailed accounts and analyses of the law practices, rituals, and customs of chieftaincy. Kludze begins his study with a historical account bringing his analyses to the present, and speculates on the future of chieftaincy in its formal and informal roles in the changing social milieu. The author's close personal background and association with chieftaincy allows him to shed light on the mysterious practices and supernatural connections. Kludze offers an authoritative and comprehensive study of chieftaincy in the context of the modern social, political, and legal institutions of Ghana.