Content area
Full text
In the course of disputes over the redemarcation of district boundaries in the late 1980s, Sisala landowners in the Lambussie Traditional Area of Ghana's Upper West Region decided to demonstrate forcefully the primacy of their property rights by preventing Dagara immigrant farmers from the neighbouring chiefdom of Nandom from working their bush fields for three consecutive seasons. Unlike in the recent violent conflicts in the cocoa-producing forest belt of the Côte d'Ivoire, where clashes between local youth and immigrant farmers from the northern parts of the country and from neighbouring Burkina Faso resulted in the expulsion of tens of thousands of these 'strangers' (Chauveau 2000; Chauveau and Bobo 2003), the Dagara farmers were not evicted from their settlements. Nevertheless, subsistence production was seriously curtailed, and the situation, particularly of poorer families, was precarious with regard to food stores. Yet it was the symbolic ramifications thatmade the conflict dramatic. Dagara farmers, many of whom have been living in the Lambussie Traditional Area for decades and were even born there, felt they were being treated as mere 'settlers' and thus downgraded to second-class citizens by the Sisala restrictions on their rights to the land. Admittedly, for those cultivating the land in question in the second generation, use rights to the plots were inheritable, provided that the Sisala landowners gave their consent. However, the Dagara were not included in the ritual gathering at which sacrifices were made at the local earth shrine, and thus did not belong to the property-holding community of the 'first-comers'. And the recent conflicts showed that even long-standing use rights could be stifled. If the Sisala continued to insist on the prerogatives of their 'allodial title' - the Ghanaian legal term for the strongest, ultimate 'customary' property rights (Woodman 1996: 50-86) - where would the Dagara farmers go and what would they do?
During the protracted conflicts, some Sisala leaders went even further and claimed that not only the Lambussie Traditional Area, but all Nandom lands as well, stretching to the Black Volta, on which the Dagara had settled for many generations, in actual fact still belonged to the Sisala, and that only for reasons of political expediency did these original owners not reclaim their ancient property. The Dagara, on the other hand,...