Late Colonial Development in British West Africa: The Gonja Development Project in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, 1948-57

Grischow, Jeff D.

doi:10.2307/486115

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Beginning in the late 1940s, Morris's project in the north-west fell victim to a more ambitious programme of land planning and resettlement. Driven by Britain's desperate need for oilseeds and proteins after the Second World War, the new programme targeted export production rather than food supplies to Ashanti and the Colony (Grischow 1998(Grischow , 2001. At this time the focus of development shifted from the north-west to the central Northern Territories (Western Gonja District), with the northeast targeted as a labour supply area.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

K. R. S. Morris and Tsetse Eradication in the Gold Coast, 1928–51

Grischow¹

2006

Africa

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This article investigates the anti-tsetse fly work of colonial entomologist K. R. S. Morris in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast between 1928 and 1951. Morris's main programme was directed at the Lawra District of the north-west, where he claimed to have eliminated the tsetse population and trypanosomiasis by the end of his tenure. This achievement allowed farmers to move into the formerly infested land and reclaim the area for agricultural development. As an added benefit, Morris also claimed, eliminating tsetse flies in the Lawra District reduced the incidence of sleeping sickness in the main market towns of north-west Ashanti. The article charts Morris's work, which is historically significant for a number of reasons. First, it reveals much about the connection between anti-tsetse work and colonial development doctrine in northern Ghana. Second, it highlights the importance of studying colonial practices. Morris's clearing programme appears to have worked, but it was almost certainly based on faulty theories of tsetse ecology. In this sense, the story of anti-tsetse work in the Northern Territories shows that we might learn as much from colonial practices as from colonial ideologies.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

K. R. S. Morris and Tsetse Eradication in the Gold Coast, 1928–51

Grischow¹

2006

Africa

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“…During colonial rule, Ghana's Northern Territories were the subject of many agricultural and trade initiatives, of which shea was a focus from 1912 to the 1930s [15], until it was outpaced by interest in other crops such as groundnuts. In the Damongo area (just south of Mole National Park), the large Gonja Development Project occurred from 1948-1957; this project was located there because the British colonial government considered that the area had been vacated by slave raiding and tsetse infestation, leaving the area 'vacant', and so ready for agricultural development [33]. This project invited an influx of laborer and attempted but failed to reorganize agricultural labor, including resettling entire villages to the area, and subverting the roles of customary authorities [33].…”

Section: Contextualising the Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the Damongo area (just south of Mole National Park), the large Gonja Development Project occurred from 1948-1957; this project was located there because the British colonial government considered that the area had been vacated by slave raiding and tsetse infestation, leaving the area 'vacant', and so ready for agricultural development [33]. This project invited an influx of laborer and attempted but failed to reorganize agricultural labor, including resettling entire villages to the area, and subverting the roles of customary authorities [33]. The North Mamprusi Forestry Conference held in Navrongo in November 1947, which led to the creation of the GDC, adopted a resolution concerning land planning in the area.…”

Section: Contextualising the Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Gatekeeping Access: Shea Land Formalization and the Distribution of Market-Based Conservation Benefits in Ghana’s CREMA

Gilli

Côte

Walters

2020

Land

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Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs) in Ghana combine conservation and development objectives and were introduced in the year 2000. In some cases, they have connected collectors of shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) nuts with certified organic world markets, which can be understood as a ‘market-based’ approach to conservation. This paper examines how the benefits of this approach are distributed and argues that shea land formalization is crucial to this process. It makes this argument by drawing on interviews within two communities bordering Mole National Park. One community accepted to engage with, and benefitted from this approach, while the other did not. The paper analyzes narratives from different actors involved regarding why and how the market-based approach was accepted or rejected. It shows that, contrary to the neoliberal principles that underlie market-based conservation, a utility maximization rationale did not predominantly influence the (non-)engagement with this conservation approach. Instead, it was the history of land relations between communities and the state that influenced the decisions of the communities. We highlight the role of traditional authorities and NGOs brokering this process and unpack who in the communities profited and who was left out from benefits from this market-based conservation initiative.

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“…After World War II, the scale and intensity of these interventions increased as governmental and bureaucratic infrastructures were expanded and funding was augmented in order to bring scientific and technical expertise to bear on colonial subjects and territories (Cooper 1997;Beusekom and Hodgson 2000). Grischow's (2001) study of the Gonja Development Project in the Gold Coast-a massive scheme to promote agricultural modernisation in the country's Northern Territories-brings out the way in which these interventions fused the economic and political imperatives that colonial authorities confronted, but at the same time sought to depoliticise questions of development in a context where anti-colonial nationalism was gaining ground. In a nutshell, the project sought to resettle rural populations on an unoccupied tract of land in the western Gonja region of the Northern Territories and to promote mechanised groundnut production.…”

Section: Struggles Over Development In World-historical Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Power, Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda

Nilsen

2016

Int J Polit Cult Soc

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This article engages with radical critiques of the Eurocentric grammar of development discourses. I start from a position of considerable sympathy with their appreciation of the discursive dimensions of power that attach to the idiom of development and their solidarity with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups. However, this sympathy combines with a considerable degree of disagreement in terms of how the discursive power of development is understood and how the dynamics of popular resistance are theorised. As an alternative to the relatively crude postulation of development as a discursive regime that enables the West to exercise power over the Rest, I develop an argument that emphasises the multivalent character of the idiom of development and trace this multivalence to situated contestations that take place between opposing political projects that strive to shape the form and direction of social change in specific ways. Furthermore, I will argue that this contentious dynamic becomes particularly evident in those world-historical conjunctures when subaltern groups mobilize around social movement projects that destabilise hegemonic power relations in the capitalist world-system. To illustrate this point, I will provide a broad-brushed outline of three distinct 'development regimes' that have shaped North-South relations from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and discuss the ways in which these regimes have been destabilised by the articulation of oppositional meanings of development articulated from below by progressive social movement projects. Finally, I draw on my own fieldwork experiences to reflect on how critical scholars can engage with movement projects that challenge the dominant directions and meanings of development in ways that can contribute to democratic deliberations within social movements.

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Late Colonial Development in British West Africa: The Gonja Development Project in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, 1948-57

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

K. R. S. Morris and Tsetse Eradication in the Gold Coast, 1928–51

K. R. S. Morris and Tsetse Eradication in the Gold Coast, 1928–51

Gatekeeping Access: Shea Land Formalization and the Distribution of Market-Based Conservation Benefits in Ghana’s CREMA

Power, Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda

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