Rural ‘Community’, Chiefs and Social Capital: The Case of Southern Ghana

Abstract

Social capital emphasizes community and social cohesion as the foundation of development. In Africa, this has prompted the promotion of traditional authorities as agents of development because chiefs and elders are assumed to embody communal norms. Critics have argued that this vision is ahistorical. In response, social capitalists have attempted to ‘historicize’ their analyses. But in many cases, ‘history’ simply refers to the micro‐level production of trust, networks and norms. From a historian's perspective this is problematic because it ignores historical processes that often produce social hierarchies and inequality within ‘traditional’ communities. Using a case study from southern Ghana, I argue that, because of their particular view of history, many social capitalists remain blind to differentiation and conflict at the community level. As a result, social capital‐driven projects run the risk of reproducing deeply rooted inequalities.

African Re-Agrarianization? Accumulation or Pro-Poor Agricultural Growth?

“…Qualitative interviews carried out in 2011 suggest that the explanation for such mobility may be tied to institutional specificities related to customary land tenure systems, which have circumscribed land rights among migrant populations for the past century. Such findings concur with literature that has questioned the equity of Ghanaian customary land tenure systems on a variety of grounds related to gender, age and ethnicity (Amanor, 2010;Amanor & Ubink, 2008;Boni, 2008;Grischow, 2008). In the Eastern Region, sharecropping arrangements between migrant ethnic groups and the clan heads of the villages (often absentee landowners) mean that half of the produce is paid as rent to the owner.…”

Land reforms in Africa: Theory, practice, and outcome

“…However, more careful analysis of the roots of these customs shows a different picture. In Ghana, for example, a rich historical analysis of the rules of communal land ownership by the historian Jeff Grischow (2008) shows that the historical roots of chieftaincy was one closely related to economic wealth and power. Therefore, from the beginning, people with more resources became chiefs and, in turn, created rules to further entrench their positions.…”

Going with the Grain in African Development?

“…Recently, there has been no shortage of academic criticism of chiefs, denigrating them as agents of 'decentralized despotism', and it is true that chiefs have often played a predatory role (Grischow, 2008;Mamdani, 1996). 21 In some parts of Africa, even though the chief might sit on a bedrock of traditional legitimacy, links to a central state will have divorced his interests from those of his subjects, as probably in Sierra Leone, where post-war consultations revealed the abuse of chieftancy as one of the driving 19.…”