Chieftaincy Disputes In Southern Volta Region

Of late, there has been some focus on social media on chieftaincy disputes in southern VR, Anlo in particular. A number of causes and solutions were offered. Paramount among the causes are impostors with no right to succession usurping or attempting to usurp stools, often with the help of politicians, that’s, political interference. Also, rivalry between lineages as to whose turn it is to succeed. And then, enstooled chiefs failing to perform; worse indulging in bad things such as selling clan lands and not following customs. To eradicate these disputes, registering potential heirs to stools and destooling bad chiefs featured prominently among the suggestions. These are not new topics or suggestions, as it is a terrain well covered by others; even myself. Not much, however, has been written about why these sort of thing are happening, for us to really understand the root of the problem. That is what I want to focus on, albeit tentatively, in this article, and point to some already suggested solutions. I had written exhaustively and extensively on what is happening in Anlo and other parts of Ghana much earlier, and shall refer the interested reader to those articles, the links pasted below^1,, for a deeper grasp of the issues touched upon here.

What we are experiencing today is the culmination of several generations of decay and alienation that started during the colonial era of the patrimonial system upon which our family and the chieftaincy institutions are based. This is coupled with the corruption and bastardisation of the presumably modern structures of the post-colonial state such as the regional and national houses of chiefs and the judiciary to administer the chieftaincy institution rationally.

To us Africans, the family is not the nuclear family of the Europeans but the network of extended relations comprising both filial and affinal relations with a family head as the patriarch, supported by adult males with their own families and lineages, as Anlo is a lineage-based society. Together, they preside over the family affairs and taking crucial biding decisions. In the past, they had command over the reproductive rights of younger family members: determining access to land to farm, fish creeks for sustenance and partner to marry. They, therefore, commanded absolute authority and respect, as disobedience came at great cost. That is not the case any longer.

Colonialism and the new opportunities such as Western education, alternative means of sustenance in paid employment in government service and the merchant houses, independent traders and migration to other places to farm or fish started eroding this absolutist power, undermining the lineage-based family system and causing even close family alienation with even first cousins not knowing each other long before independence. From the C19th, the people of southern VR in particular grabbed these new opportunities with vigour due to the scarcity of land. That is why, from the Congo to Senegal, one can find Ewe fishing “settlements of colonisation,” not only seasonal fishing camps.

Even slaves and freed slaves escaped to the coastal towns and took up these opportunities in the new colonial administration and merchant houses being set up, thus becoming the nucleus seeds of the new so-called modern elite, as they were the first to embrace missionary education and jobs in the army and police the nonslave descents and those from the traditional elite looked down upon even into the ‘80s. Not much study of this was done in the English colonies, as compared to what the French Marxists did in the ex-French colonies. e.g., the writings of Claude Meillassoux. English scholars considered that kind of study as “chronique scandale” and avoided it, as noted by Kiyaga-Mulindwa. For a better understanding of the Ghanaian elite responsible for these disputes, we cannot avoid delving into their backgrounds, that is, pointing our hands behind the backs of the clueless actors, some of them politicians. Some taboos have to be broken in order to deal with the jinx these evil geniis of chieftaincy disputes have been unleashing on us.

The same colonial contingencies removed, too, often at an early age, most of the offsprings of the traditional elite and ordinary citizens from their homesteads to areas far away where they were cut off from being nurtured by their traditional norms, history and indigenous knowledge. The children they started giving birth to in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s grew up largely cut off from any meaningful knowledge and appreciation of their traditions and customs and extended family members, but have become the main ignorant actors behind the chieftaincy disputes. They often lack knowledge of the genealogy of claimants to stools, as had been clearly demonstrated in the Awoamefia dispute case. The problem is compounded by the oral transmission of knowledge despite the fact that some of these actors could boast of being even fourth generation literates on their paternal sides. However, their literate ancestors did not record down even their genealogies, and they themselves are not bothering to record such things down for their children before the very old people who still have some knowledge of those things die off. As has been noted by scholars, when such people die in Africa, it is like a library burnt down.

Overall, I bet 99% of us adult Ghanaians over 60 would not be able to trace the genealogies of our parents to even our grandparents on both sides. That would involve knowledge of the family trees of four families. That is why ignorance of the genealogies of claimants is an overwhelming reason for the disputes, with some proving to be ignorant idiots sticking to their wrong claims even if told they were wrong. This is compounded by our ancestors having adopted children or children with slave wives, children who were not considered as having the right to succession or heirs, but the scions of these children are often unaware of their descent, as taboos prohibited telling them about their true origins.

In fact, even the lands given to slaves to farm as a form of “peculia” [peculium, sing.], usufructory rights are only ceded to them when alive, and so could be regained from their progenies, giving rise to the incessant land disputes in the country because many such descendants of slave, especially children of the grandsires, were not told about their descent. One must note that even in a lineage-based society as Anlo, even nonslave bonafide family members only enjoy usufructory claim to lands by birth and the allodial rights remain with the lineage. Much of the land had since been fragmented and shared among family members, thus creating individual ownership of land. In Asante, the ntoro principle allowed a man who did not have a matrilineal heir to allow his slave child to inherit him instead of his patrilineal family, but this could still and often trigger a dispute.

Since most of those actors have backgrounds in the corrupt state apparatus, whether descendants of slaves or nonslave royal or ordinary descents (I’m avoiding mentioning names), they tend to exhibit the same corrupt and dishonest attitudes associated with state institutions in pursuit of their wrongful claims and/or support for the false claims. Being willfully blind to even all facts that expose the falsity of claims of the impostors is thus one of their characteristics. That is being bloody ignorant, which becomes a source of very stupid decisions and actions by them. As Maxine Rovere pointed out, such ignorant idiots don’t give a damn in pursuance of their illegal and uncustomary agendas! Many have supported military coups and rule of the whole country, so what is a corner of the country like Anlo they cannot ride roughshod over? They are thus unconscionable individuals with no conscience and respect for our customs and traditions.

Perhaps, those customs and traditions have become outmoded, an anachronism that needs serious reforming, if not outright rejection and jettisoning as some preferred. I took a middle path in my write up with proposals to reform the chieftaincy institution in Ghana, as conveyed in this article with the link below². It is influenced by some suggestions C.A.C Amate made in his The Making of Ada, developments in Liberia under their new constitution, which allows any qualified citizen within a designated traditional area to contest to be a chief for 7 years, thereby abolishing hereditary chieftaincy. After all, only the Awoamezi was a hereditary stool in the past. Other Anlo settlements were administered by the “hanuawo” and the “asafohenes” later, positions that were based on merit, not birth, a source of disputes today, as different families served in those positions before. Torgbui Sri II’s reform in the 1930s that recognised incumbents of such positions as chiefs (fiawo), their descendants to inherit them, must be respected until any negotiated changed. The revanchist claims of families that held such positions must, therefore, be rejected. If they are worthy today, they may be offered Dumega titles and assist the incumbents in the development of their communities. I totally reject the bizarre elevation of more than 40 chiefs to the position of paramount chiefs by the impostor and his henchmen. For the detailed suggestions for reforms, please read the article below.

What about the modern contraptions set up by the post-colonial state to deal with any case of dispute as the regional houses of chiefs? They have been failing woefully to perform their roles, as they were not properly structured and resourced to do so. In a situation when parties to case even have to be financing the members of the regional houses to attend meetings and perform their duties, it is a sham that they could perform effectively and fairly. On one occasion when the litigants were not informed about a cancelled sitting so that they would not travel to Ho, they blamed lack of phone access for that. Mr Segbedzi, one of the Nugblegawo supporting the impostor Agboba, promptly bought for each of the paramount chiefs sitting in the Awoamezi case a mobile phone! That was only one of his “generous” gifts to the VR House of Chief led then by the late Togbega Gabusu of Gbidzigbe, which turned the House into a moribund joke before Togbe Afede came to take over and continued with the biased handling of the case before the VR House of Chiefs. I had put forward proposals to create a more representative and responsive District Houses of Chiefs to replace the ineffective regional houses of chiefs in the article below but would like to modify that to each “dukor” or “kingdom”. We do not need the regional houses of chiefs, except for a region like the Ashanti Region, to adjudicate on who are truly descended from our families and who are illegitimate pretenders who can easily be exposed through a DNA test ordered by the ordinary court of the land, should the case go there. It is sheer stupidity to have a case lingering before a house of chiefs or court for 20 years! In fact, it is insane! Sanity MUST be brought to prevail in the administration of justice in Ghana!

That brings me to the inept roles of the ordinary courts too in perpetuating the chieftaincy disputes because the judges and judiciary staff manning them are also corrupted and unconscionable bastards, too. The antics of the heavily corrupted and disgraced Denu High Court Judge, the late Mr Woanya, is a case study of how corrupt or compromised the ordinary courts have become, as we all knew before Anas exposed them. But, it is not the only example in even the Anlo Awoamefia dispute case. How the contempt case brought against the impostor and his henchmen has been treated in a shambolic manner by first the so-called Fast Track court and subsequent courts is another example. This mendacious handling of cases by the ordinary courts must also be dealt with if we ever expect sanity to prevail in the chieftaincy institution in Ghana. I have lost total respect for them. Fellow Ghanaians must join me to express our “avsky” [anger, disgust, contempt, disdain] against them and compel them to change their heinous behavior.

1. https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/Taming-The-Ghanaian-State-Reforming-Chieftaincy-203958
2. https://www.modernghana.com/news/651531/re-houses-of-chiefs-irrelevant-lepowura.html
3. Claude Meillassoux: A Class Analysis of the Bureaucratic Process in Mali, Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 6 - 2, January 1970: 98-110
4. Kiyaga-Mulindwa: The “Akan” Problem, The Wenner Anthropological Research 0011-3204/80/2104-0006$01.00. Vol. 21-No. 4, August 1980.
5. Maxime Rovere: How to Deal With IDIOTS (AND STOP BEING ONE YOURSELF), Translated by David Bellos. Profile Books Ltd, 2021.