Review by The American Historical Review, June 2004
Joseph K. Adjaye, University of Pittsburgh
Throughout Ghana, there are innumerable chiefs of varying levels of authority and configuration. Many of these chiefs are directly descended from rulers who, centuries ago, administered autonomous traditional states. Then, as now, when he appears in ceremonial functions, the chief, especially in southern and central Ghana, is magnificently clothed, bedecked with copious gold jewelry, and surrounded by royal insignia, projecting an image that evokes consummate majesty, tradition, and power.
Yet, as political independence dawned in the immediate postwar period, politicians and scholars alike wondered whether chieftaincy would not in time become as anachronistic as colonialism itself. After all, the processes by which chiefs ruled and the rituals by which their authority was maintained, it was argued would make the institution antithetical to modernization. Would modernization create a new kind of Ghanaian citizenry for whom chieftaincy would be irrelevant?
Richard Rathbone's book chronicles the processes by which the Convention Peoples' Party government of Kwame Nkrumah systematically assaulted chiefly power to the point that in the course of a mere decade this historic institution of chieftaincy in Ghana was radically altered. Determined to end the fissiparousness of regionalism, Nkrumah's government proceeded on a course aimed at reforming the palpably unsatisfactory local government system, and in the process it severely compromised the authority of traditional rulers.
Rathbone makes a highly significant contribution to our understanding of the domestic political history of Ghana, which is largely incomprehensible without an active consideration of chieftaincy. Heretofore, most scholars of Ghana's recent history have been more fascinated by the glamor of the central epic of Ghana's nationalist triumph¿that is, the heroic story of decolonization¿to the relative neglect of the less attractive and more complex history of chieftaincy.
First, following the Korsah Commission of 1951, the largely unregulated Native Court system was reformed and renamed local courts, with "chiefly benches" being replaced by paid magistrates. "This," according to Rathbone, "seemed to herald the beginning of the end of chiefly domination of local justice" (p. 50). Simultaneously, chiefs' control over stool revenues was also whittled away. Further, their role in national politics was marginalized by the creation of regional Houses Of Chiefs, which could consider only matters referred to them by government ministers or the national Assembly, and even then their role was virtually limited to proffering advice to government.
In the assault on chieftaincy, recalcitrant chiefs such as Okyenhene Ofori Atta 11 were publicly humiliated and ultimately destooled, notwithstanding the stout defense put up by one of Ghana's leading jurists, J. B. Danquah, who was evidently right in asserting that not only were the traditional states over whom the chiefs ruled older than the modern state of Ghana itself, but that the lives of most people were regulated by custom and not solely by national laws. Henceforth, a chief could be so recognized only when he was gazetted, and thus, chiefs could now be legally deposed by government without any recourse to customary law or practice.
Through other constitutional means, the independent power of chiefs was methodically eroded. Any chief who was suspected of being a sympathizer of the National Liberation Movement opposition party lived under fear of destoolment. In the Ashanti Region where the powerful Asantchene traditionally was supreme, the Ashanti Confederacy was reconstructed in 1958, leading to a dilution of the Asantehene's power, and subsequently the Ashanti Lands Bill placed the Kumasi stool lands and their revenues under the direct control of central government.
Much of this, by Rathbone's own admission, is "not a pretty story" (p. 8), but it is one that has to be told nonetheless. In the end, "although independent chieftaincy . . . was most assuredly defeated, chieftaincy itself was not dead" (p. 142). Although considerably transformed, the institution of chieftaincy has survived against great odds, in part because chiefs continue to "symbolize place" and "pride in locality"; they occupy a particular niche in the long chain of history (p. 164). In fact, the history and politics of governance in Ghana are considerably enriched by Rathbone's analysis, which provides a particular and powerful context for understanding the nature of Ghana's postindependence political topography, especially that of the rural terrain.
Chieftaincy is inexorably part of Ghana's long history and what makes it distinctive. Local histories may lack the high drama of the politics of national history, yet Rathbone's account is itself full of drama. In some ways a sequel to his Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana (1993), this book is written with characteristic elegance, flair, and fluidity.
American Historical Review
