In January of 1944, A. W. Davies, district commissioner of northern Ghana's Builsa District, showed the chief commissioner of the Northern Territories some of the new projects that the colonial government had begun to fund over the preceding years – latrines, schools and teacher housing, dispensaries, rural roads and bridges, and dams and wells. Davies argued for Builsa's potential as a site for projects by informing the chief commissioner that the paramount chief, the Sandemnaab Azantilow, had supplied the government with unpaid labor: ‘Nearly all the labourers, I find, whom Your Honour saw working on the new Sandema dam, are voluntary workers – there are only seven names on the time sheet, which is encouraging.’Footnote 1
Prior to the 1940s, colonial funding for such projects in northern Ghana was exceedingly rare. Demands for unpaid labor were not. Systematic reliance on forced labor was central to the construction of public works in colonial Ghana, and these burdens fell heavily on northerners.Footnote 2 Over the course of the next two decades, however, unprecedented state funding flowed into small-scale public projects in the region. Along with new funding came pressures on administrators and, increasingly, on political party networks, to make choices about where and how to spend funds. Northern Ghanaians soon found that their contributions of so-called ‘voluntary’, ‘communal’, or ‘self-help’ labor were key determinants of where colonial and postcolonial governments allocated local development projects.
Thus, after two decades of bans on forced labor from the International Labour Organization and the British Colonial Office, in the shadow of anti-forced labor activism and the passage of the Houphouët-Boigny law in neighboring French colonies, and as northern Ghanaian politicians spoke about refusing to be seen as simply ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’, unpaid rural labor became a normal part of development practice in the region.Footnote 3 This article asks how that happened. It shows how unpaid labor allowed three sets of actors – colonial officials, northern chiefs, and party politicians – to manage the local political implications of rapidly increasing development funding and the end of colonial rule. Depending on the context, unpaid labor could be cast as a way to cut costs, a catalyst for new forms of political subjecthood, or an expression of political cohesion. Certain northern chiefs, whose official positions were made uncertain by the end of indirect rule and the emergence of party politics, found that their ability to raise labor put them in a unique position to navigate a rapidly changing political landscape.
The role of unpaid labor in allocating and attracting development funding introduced new mechanisms for compulsion as well as opportunities for local political negotiation. As this article shows, the line between coercion and voluntarism was rarely clear, nor were the political and social meanings of labor fixed for officials, chiefs, or their constituents.Footnote 4 Regional and district records along with oral historical evidence help to show how daily negotiations over budgeting and building, money and labor, created the conditions for self-help labor to become politically and practically acceptable to local actors and, ultimately, to colonial and national governments.Footnote 5 Rather than resolving the ambiguities surrounding demands for unpaid labor, these negotiations enshrined them in the practice of development.
In recent scholarship, Africa's mid-century has emerged as a time of flourishing political visions and shifting frameworks for claims, in which Africans pursued multiple avenues to government.Footnote 6 Scholars have examined change and continuity in the period through formal political struggles, a range of mass movements, and a multiplicity of disputes over land and ethnicity.Footnote 7 The institution of unpaid labor, while seldom the focus of these discussions, provides a complex but useful lens through which to examine the mutability of the terms on which government was practiced, legitimized, and contested during this period. Recent works by Benedetta Rossi, Alexander Keese, and Opolot Okia demonstrate that ‘communal labor’ emerged as a rhetorical and legal strategy of colonial governments that were faced with mounting critiques of forced labor. Administrators in French and British colonies were all too eager to exploit gaping loopholes in forced labor bans that allowed unpaid labor to be classified as a ‘normal civic obligation’, used as an emergency measure, or justified as a ‘minor communal service’. These authors provide clear evidence that force and compulsion, often enacted by chiefs, could undergird a range of activities under the guise of communal or voluntary labor.Footnote 8
In the period from the 1940s through the 1960s – often termed the ‘development era’ – calls for ‘self-help’, ‘communal’, or ‘voluntary’ work became enmeshed in the practice and rhetoric of governments across the continent.Footnote 9 Policies were often built on fundamental incongruities. In a recent article on kazi ya kujitolea (voluntary) labor in Tanzania, Emma Hunter suggests that late colonial and postcolonial states drew on contested conceptions of citizenship, belonging, and duty to cast unpaid labor as both virtuous and an essential component of a welfare state.Footnote 10 Similarly, Priya Lal has argued that the ongoing tension between a rhetoric of self-sufficiency and the reality of central government funding in Tanzania's Mtwara region created space for competing interpretations of ‘self-reliance’ by actors on local, regional, and national stages.Footnote 11
Beyond these works, the practices of ‘communal’, ‘self help’, and ‘voluntary’ labor have remained marginal to the study of developmentalism in Africa. Recent scholarship has brought attention to the exploitation of people and environments as well as the mixed opportunities presented by large-scale development projects that spanned colonial and postcolonial eras. The focus on large-scale projects has lent itself to classifications of historical actors as either agents or subjects of development work.Footnote 12 In drawing attention to small-scale projects, this article illuminates how discourses and practices of development could be used to reshape the work of government by actors and in spaces that trouble imagined distinctions between ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ development. It joins recent scholarship that seeks to account for histories in which neither development nor governance is easily interpreted as an extension of ‘high modernist’ statecraft.Footnote 13 Instead, planning, funding structures, and popular demands for development emerge as elements of a dynamic and contingent mid-century politics.Footnote 14
Scholars have long realized that institutions of chieftaincy offer important windows into the ambiguities of colonial and postcolonial statecraft.Footnote 15 In a variety of contexts, historians have shown how chieftaincy became enmeshed in the shifting politics of development.Footnote 16 Scholars have not focused on the persistence of chiefly involvement in the daily bureaucratic practices of mid-century states, a role that has become particularly apparent in development initiatives of the late twentieth century.Footnote 17
This article traces the careers of two chiefs in neighboring districts of northern Ghana: the Sandemnaab Azantilow, paramount chief of Builsa, and the Wulugunaba Sebiyam, the Mamprusi divisional chief of Kpasenkpe in what was then Mamprusi District. Born around 1900, Azantilow was chief for over seventy years, from 1931 to 2006. The Wulugunaba Sebiyam, who was approximately twenty years his junior, was chief from 1942 until his death in 1992. Both men built long reputations as champions of development and education, although these elements were by no means the only focus of their chieftaincies.Footnote 18 Early interactions with development practice allowed them to cement their relevance in a tumultuous period and to add development to the available arsenal of chiefly practice.
The early career of the Sandemnaab Azantilow illuminates how ‘communal labor’ came to be a central part of indirect rule in northern Ghana in the 1930s and 1940s. Administrators turned to certain chiefs to supply unpaid labor, rewarding it with government grants in an attempt to paper over emerging tensions between the developmentalist and conservative ambitions of indirect rule. In the subsequent decades, the early career of the Wulugunaba Sebiyam illuminates the surprising persistence of connections among chieftaincy, development projects, and unpaid labor in the face of the rapid rise in colonial funding for development, the abolition of indirect rule, and the emergence of party politics. It shows how chiefs, colonial officials, and party politicians forged lasting mechanisms for appropriating northern labor, ultimately creating the circumstances through which successive governments could frame unpaid labor as a legitimate demand on rural citizens.
In April of 1963, nearly two decades after Davies's report, the northern regional commissioner of independent Ghana, Mumuni Bawumia, underscored how unpaid rural labor had cemented the connections among chiefs and postcolonial governments. Applauding the ability of a group of northern chiefs to raise ‘self-help’ labor, he cast it as both a measure of ‘support for Osagyefo's development programme’ and a way to ‘augment the Government's efforts’. ‘Remember that no one will build Ghana for us’, he concluded, ‘we must build it.’Footnote 19
INDIRECT RULE, ‘PROGRESSIVE’ CHIEFTAINCY, AND COMMUNAL LABOR
Azantilow was born shortly before British occupation in 1902. In 1911, the British designated the office of Sandemnaab (chief of Sandema) as the ‘paramount’, or ‘head’ chieftaincy in the surrounding Builsa area.Footnote 20 In the early twentieth century, colonial interventions in the Northern Territories followed shifting ideas about the region's economy. As it became clear that the North's economy would not be based on private investment, export crops, or mineral wealth, colonial officials began to see taxation as increasingly unfeasible and instead turned to appropriation of colonial subjects’ labor. Officials were authorized to conscript adult men to work on northern roads for 24 days per year, and northern laborers were often forced to construct public works in the South, serve in the colonial military, and work for private enterprises including southern mines.Footnote 21 As the brother of two of the first three paramount chiefs in Sandema, Azantilow likely witnessed the colonial interface of chieftaincy crystalize around recruitment of forced labor. In the First World War, the Builsa area also became known to colonial officials as a key site for military recruitment, for which Azantilow's brother, Afoko, was presented a medallion.Footnote 22
By the 1920s, colonial officials embarked on a concerted effort to understand, catalog and, in many cases, reshape local structures of authority in the interest of designating ‘head chiefs’ who could act as counterparts to colonial district commissioners (DCs).Footnote 23 Officials recast the North's lack of exports as a virtue, envisioning a long-term path to peasant production that would avoid the perceived social disruptions (and actual economic and political power) associated with African accumulation in the South.Footnote 24 By the 1930s, the imposition of indirect rule sought to formalize the positions of head chiefs through the Native Authority system, at the same time responding to colonial and International Labour Organization bans on forced labor.Footnote 25
Azantilow became Sandemnaab in 1931, shortly before the creation of the Builsa Native Authority in 1935. In the subsequent years, Azantilow and colonial administrators worked out the practical contours of head chieftaincy amidst the contradictions of indirect rule. Colonial officials searched for head chiefs whom they considered ‘progressive’ – each of whom could be, as Carola Lentz puts it, ‘a capable … [yet] obedient administrator, who allowed himself to be incorporated in the bureaucratic hierarchy’.Footnote 26 Architects of indirect rule hoped that local taxes would make each Native Authority revenue-neutral while also demonstrating ‘the value of local government’ through public works. This vision came up against the practical impossibility of raising significant funds through direct taxation in large areas of the North.
In 1935, noting the ‘meagre’ resources raised by many Native Authorities, the governor proposed to divert some revenue collected under the Land and Native Rights Ordinance and the Mineral Rights Ordinance to fund ‘works of local benefit’ in the Northern Territories, at least in ‘those native administrations whose poverty, need, and eagerness to progress would make them deserving cases’. The ‘sums allocated could not be large’ (approximately £1,000 annually for the entire region), but would ‘encourage progressive local authorities’.Footnote 27 The introduction of this development funding confronted officials with the question of how government grants could encourage ‘progressive’ government without creating new claims on the colonial state or (of even greater concern to officials) providing opportunities for Native Authorities to enrich themselves. Administrators turned to the familiar strategy of unpaid labor, raised by chiefs, to smooth over the tensions of local governance. Officials hoped that labor would reduce costs, limit opportunities for personal accumulation, and serve as an affirmation of local support.
In the early years of indirect rule, Azantilow took up the project of education by raising labor to construct a primary school without government funds. Recollections gathered for the Sandemnaab's funeral noted that ‘he refused an offer of a loan from the British colonialists and rather offered £10 of £15 that was needed to complete the school project’.Footnote 28 When colonial officials began to contemplate where to spend new funds, they were thus able to frame grants to Builsa as responding to contributions already raised by the chief. In March of 1936, Chief Commissioner of the Northern Territories W. J. A. Jones recommended allocating one of the first grants to build a dispensary at Sandema. Despite having little revenue, he argued, the Builsa ‘people under the active leadership of the head chief have shown highly commendable initiative in the development of their country’ by building the school, constructing latrines, undertaking sanitary measures approved by the medical officer, and building roads that despite being ‘maintained without payment, are among the best in the Protectorate’. In addition, Jones argued that funding would serve a political purpose, by offering the administration ‘great assistance in proving the value of local government’ despite a lack of local tax revenue.Footnote 29
Colonial officials, perhaps unsurprisingly, showed little interest in ascertaining how the Sandemnaab and other chiefs raised labor for local public works. Unless demands for unpaid labor generated formal complaints or contributed to chieftaincy disputes, officials were content to interpret labor as a sign of popular support. Because they could simply choose alternate sites if confronted with resistance, there is also very little evidence that officials explicitly authorized force. This is in contrast to other northern development initiatives, such as tsetse eradication, for which colonial officials were more than willing to authorize chiefly coercion and punishment with respect to unpaid labor.Footnote 30 By raising labor without colonial involvement, chiefs like the Sandemnaab effectively demonstrated their ability to manage the popular and political implications of colonial funding.
The Sandemnaab's ‘active leadership’ continued to impress colonial officials. In 1939, Jones recommended additional funding to build wells and maintain the Sandema school, noting the efficiency with which Builsa chiefs collected taxes, if not the amounts raised.Footnote 31 Officials praised Azantilow's growing knowledge of English and the comparative ease of practicing indirect rule in the area.Footnote 32 The Sandemnaab replicated his predecessor's drive for military recruitment, leading Jones to argue that further grants should be made ‘in recognition of the splendid work of the Headchief and his council not only in the administration of their country but in the raising of recruits, of whom some 350 were forthcoming in a few days’.Footnote 33 Azantilow's reputation was buoyed by his embrace of colonial ‘mixed farming’ and his willingness to engage in anti-meningitis campaigns by ‘call[ing] in on’ or ‘deal[ing] with’ patients and chiefs.Footnote 34
It is difficult to access the Sandemnaab's early motivations for engaging with colonial developmentalism, but the effects of these activities on his relationships with administrators are clear.Footnote 35 A number of episodes in 1940 demonstrate that Azantilow found new leverage to contest colonial plans. While narratives were written by district officials, the Sandemnaab's negotiations are evident. In February of 1940, after noting his ‘amazement’ with the Sandemnaab's ‘knowledge of the works that are being undertaken and of their cost’, the DC of Navrongo reported the chief's insistent requests for a new Native Authority lorry. Monthly diaries highlight Azantilow's willingness to show local projects to visiting technical officials, but they also demonstrate his disdain for recommendations that poor districts rely on inexpensive technologies. After an April collapse in the temporary ‘bush-stick bridge’ that had been constructed according to government requirements, Azantilow arranged for the Builsa Native Authority to begin construction of a permanent bridge. The DC noted: ‘It will cost a lot of money, but the Builsas are going to attempt it’, because, ‘the Sandemnab hates bush-stick bridges.’Footnote 36
The Sandemnaab's performance of ‘active’ chieftaincy was also clearly geared to audiences beyond the colonial administration. In preparation for a government-sponsored trip, Azantilow insisted that the lorry drive from the town lorry park ‘some 100 yards’ to collect him at his house, while other chiefs walked.Footnote 37 The symbolism was likely not lost on the audience of visiting chiefs and town residents. Similarly, the Sandemnaab was careful to plan a lorry trip that took all of his subchiefs to visit his ‘enormous’ bullock-ploughed farm. One of the chiefs, obviously thinking of perennial efforts to raise farm labor from constituents, noted that he would ‘need nearly 100 hoes to do the same work’.Footnote 38
By 1940, ‘progressive’ chieftaincy, unpaid labor, and government grants had become key elements of indirect rule, so much so that officials and chiefs actively avoided the substitution of direct taxation for unpaid labor during and after the Second World War, even as access to wage labor increased. In other parts of British colonial Africa, the Second World War offered an opportunity for officials to justify forced labor as an emergency measure.Footnote 39 In northern Ghana, however, district officials and chiefs began demonstrating compliance with forced labor bans by paying for road labor. In the Builsa area, additional paid labor opportunities came in 1942 with the construction of a military airfield (or ‘aerodrome’) that, while never used for military maneuvers, briefly employed over 1000 laborers.Footnote 40
Officials and chiefs entered into local labor markets made intensely competitive by military recruitment and expanded opportunities for wage labor in the South. In June of 1942, when a colony-wide decision to offer a ‘cost of living’ bonus was implemented unevenly between workers employed by the Native Authorities and the aerodrome project, district officials noted difficulties hiring road labor until the pay difference was eliminated. As the harvest began in September, the aerodrome competed with agricultural labor, which occasioned an increase in daily wages from 8 to 9 pence per day.Footnote 41 Similarly, in July of 1943, DC Davies argued that wages for building a forest ranger's bungalow needed to be increased to attract labor during the planting season.Footnote 42
The expanded labor market raised the possibility that direct taxation, not labor, could be used to cement the connection between local government and development spending. Hopes for taxation reflected a growing ambivalence about the role of chiefs in colonial administration, including fears that mixed farming had become a mechanism of accumulation.Footnote 43 Soon, though, taxation emerged as yet another source of official anxiety. District files are replete with Native Authority plans to capture greater fees and taxes from constituents – with chiefs remarking that the ‘people were now full of money’ and that there was ‘more money about than ever before’. While district officials had applauded the efficient (if modest) collection of taxes in previous years, the prospect of increased taxation raised fears that chieftaincy would become a ‘money making business like [it is in] some other parts of the Colony’.Footnote 44
The continued role of ‘progressive’ chiefs in the provision of wells, schools, and dispensaries allowed Azantilow and others to avoid these critiques. Azantilow presented himself to district officials as a bulwark against chiefly financial accumulation. In April of 1943, Davies noted with alarm the ‘determined effort on the part of the [Builsa] chiefs to raise their salaries’, and recounted with appreciation that the Sandemnaab ‘did more than I to dissuade them’.Footnote 45 Monthly diaries of district officials in the 1940s continued to emphasize the multiple roles of the Sandemnaab as a mixed farmer, a supporter of local development, and a source for unpaid labor. Unpaid labor undergirded nearly all small-scale projects, and Azantilow raised labor to build, among other things, a bridge, a teacher's compound, and a number of local dams and wells.Footnote 46 Early on, officials remarked that the chief of nearby Chiana was ‘of the Sandemnab standard’, and the two chiefs dominated colonial officials’ accounts of area development projects in the 1940s.Footnote 47 Family and local residents recall the 1940s and 1950s as a time when Azantilow involved constituents in a variety of interlinked initiatives in farming, education and health – including the institution of a cattle kraal, promulgation of a compulsory call for universal education in 1949, and calls for unpaid labor to build primary schools in surrounding towns.Footnote 48 It was also in this period that the Sandemnaab was invited to England to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.Footnote 49
To colonial officials, however, the unpaid labor recruited by chiefs like the Sandemnaab was seen primarily as a cost-cutting measure, or as an example of ‘what can be done with a little N. A. money and a lot of local co-operation’.Footnote 50 In June of 1943, Davies met with Builsa chiefs about ‘constructing dams and wells next dry season by unpaid voluntary labour, so that the money available may be spent chiefly on Cement, stone, and Masons’. Given continued official ambivalence about both the feasibility and dangers of local taxation, colonial officials must have also seen ‘communal’ labor as a way to harness chiefs’ authority without providing them an opportunity for monetary gain. As the next section will elaborate, the requirement that development funding be matched by ‘communal labor’ became a key determinant of patterns of development spending after the Second World War, and a key opportunity for chiefs to re-imagine its local political content.
DEVELOPMENT, DECOLONIZATION, AND UNPAID LABOR
In the last months of the Second World War, the visiting governor of the Gold Coast called a meeting of northern chiefs. After announcing constitutional changes that would take place in 1946, he gave a promise that after the ‘difficulties’ of the war, ‘no time will be lost in the carrying out of the plans which have already been made’ to include the Northern Territories in a colony-wide ‘programme of post-war development’.Footnote 51 In the years that followed, the North was indeed included in postwar allocations that put millions of pounds of funding into development projects.
The rise in funding for colonial development projects in the postwar period throughout the continent is well known.Footnote 52 Much of the existing literature does not separate the funding controlled by central government bodies from funding allocated through local governments. In northern Ghana, for example, separate funding went toward the Gonja Development Company (1948–57), a large-scale project typical of postwar development planning.Footnote 53 For most northerners and colonial officials, however, development schemes came in the form of more modest rural projects, injecting new funding into existing plans for schools, clinics, roads, and wells. District records reveal dramatic increases in the ‘Ordinary Grants-in-Aid’ allocated to northern districts, from just over £51,000 in 1946/7 to over £220,000 in 1955/6. Additional funding for ‘Development Grants-in-Aid’ climbed from an initial £70,000 in 1948/9 to over £132,000 in 1957/8, with similar amounts available for ‘Regional Development’ by the mid-1950s, under the purview of Kwame Nkrumah as prime minister.Footnote 54 Ministries such as the Department of Social Welfare and Community Development supplied additional funding for development projects, particularly through the Mass Education Programme. Due to its widespread importance at the local level, it is this small-scale funding that interests me here.
Development funding and regional redistribution were central to northern electoral politics from the beginning. Officials saw agricultural development as a source of colony-wide food security to address urban protest in the South, while demands from northern politicians in the postwar period added to the political impetus for regional development.Footnote 55 Over the course of the early 1950s, a gulf developed between supporters of Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party (CPP) and politicians concerned about the place of a less-developed Northern Region in an independent Ghana. In 1954, a group of Legislative Assembly members launched the Northern People's Party (NPP) on an explicit platform of northern development, regional autonomy, and the preservation of chieftaincy. Unable to secure concessions on these points with the CPP, the NPP entered into an uneasy alliance with the CPP's main source of opposition, the Asante-based National Liberation Movement, which was also formed in 1954.Footnote 56 Nkrumah's Regional Development Fund, established in 1955, began to funnel additional funds to districts. In 1955, as the CPP prepared to contest the decisive 1956 elections, this was joined by an abrupt £700,000 grant for capital works at the regional level.Footnote 57 During the tense politics of the 1954 and 1956 Legislative Assembly elections, both CPP and NPP candidates in northern Ghana campaigned on platforms of northern development.
As funding increased, it was by no means obvious that chiefs would continue to have a hand in local development projects. Only a decade old in the North, policies of indirect rule were subject to a series of overhauls as the colonial state grappled with demands for self-government and the rise of political parties. A series of reforms between 1948 and 1951 integrated the Northern Territories into new legislative and administrative apparatuses, allowing the region to send representatives to the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly, integrating elected members into the Northern Territories Council, and replacing Native Authorities with partially elected Local Councils. The distinction between ‘chief’ and ‘politician’ in the North was much less apparent than elsewhere in colonial Ghana.Footnote 58 However, the end of indirect rule provided northerners with additional opportunities to connect to national networks outside of the structures of chiefly authority. Over the course of the early 1950s, party politicians began to exert influence through the administrative organs of colonial rule, particularly in regional bodies and the Department of Social Welfare and Community Development.
When development funds began to stream into northern districts, district officials had to make practical decisions about specific projects in the midst of deep institutional and political uncertainty.Footnote 59 Despite the formation of District and Local Councils, funding allocation continued to be in the hands of British DCs.Footnote 60 As both the CPP and NPP became embroiled in the intricate politics of northern chieftaincy, party politicians also had an interest in showing rapid gains in northern development.Footnote 61 As in the interwar period, the practice of administration relied less on formal planning than on piecemeal and pragmatic negotiation between the ambitions of the state and continued concerns for administrative and budgetary efficiency. To make sense of how unpaid labor continued to solve problems for chiefs, colonial officials, and party politicians, I examine the career of another chief, the Wulugunaba Sebiyam, in a town called Kpasenkpe, just east of Builsa.
THE LOCAL INVENTION OF ‘COMMUNAL LABOR’
The Wulugunaba Sebiyam became chief as a young man in 1942. While he was certainly not the most senior or the wealthiest candidate for the position, he had established a reputation as a ‘mixed farmer’ by spearheading bullock training and demonstration farms in the 1930s.Footnote 62 Early in his chieftaincy, Sebiyam participated in a colonial finance committee designed to ‘provide an opportunity for the younger and more progressive members of the community to associate themselves more closely with the Native Administration’, and officials found his work ‘excellent’.Footnote 63 When development funding began to increase dramatically in the Northern Territories, Sebiyam was poised to take advantage of it.
In October of 1948, Chief Commissioner of the Northern Territories W. H. Ingrams presented DCs with a plan for regional development that highlighted emerging tensions between goals of popular support and administrative efficiency. Exhorting DCs to devise strategies for simultaneous investments in ‘economic … civic, political, and social services development’, he encouraged them to delegate paperwork to African staff, to work on ‘getting people to realize their duties and leaving them to perform them’, and to ‘regard yourself more as the man with the oilcan not, more than you can help, as part of the machinery.’ At the same time, Ingrams suggested that ‘a pioneering spirit’ should inspire them to propose their own plans and take charge of implementation as they saw fit, warning, ‘if we are too cautious and try to co-ordinate too much we will just go on in the same old way’.Footnote 64 A response to Ingrams's letter circulated by the DC of Bawku summed up an underlying administrative principle, ‘that the most efficient committee is composed of two members of which one is permanently away ill’.Footnote 65
Directions to DCs about how to allocate funds were vague. The earliest proposals for district-level development in northern Ghana envisioned that ‘local development committees’ would be set up in each area to ‘foster local enthusiasm and initiative’. Lack of an institutional structure to administer funds, however, meant that they were disbursed idiosyncratically.Footnote 66 DCs continued to rely on head chiefs whom they perceived as ‘progressive’ to implement projects and cultivate local support. As one central government memo argued, ‘the surest way of stimulating enthusiasm is to give the community reason to believe that the ideas and plans put forward are their own’.Footnote 67
The availability of ‘communal’ or ‘self-help’ labor, raised by chiefs, soon emerged as a key measurement of the feasibility and efficiency of potential projects. Early on, one district official worried that labor demands would seem ‘like a reversion to the forced labour days’, and that northerners would be reluctant to participate.Footnote 68 As a defense against this impression, colonial officials introduced a principle of matching ‘local initiatives’ with government funding. ‘Much can be achieved with comparatively slender funds, and the extent of such an achievement will be the measure of the people's genuine desire for advancement to improved standards of living’, a central government memo argued, ‘self-help will beget, and will deserve, help from external sources.’Footnote 69 Between 1947 and 1958, development grants funded a number of projects in the Kpasenkpe area: the first primary school, market structures, wells in each section of town, extensive road clearing and repair, and an attempt to build the first all-season bridge across the White Volta River. Over the course of this decade, the Wulugunaba used his reputation as an ‘interested’ chief to strengthen relationships with an ambitious DC as well as the prominent Mamprusi politician Mumuni Bawumia. In the process, demands for ‘communal’ or ‘self help’ labor reshaped his relationships with constituents.
In the early 1950s, head chiefs encountered a cohort of DCs who had been trained in postwar ideals of planning, local government, and development.Footnote 70 Neil Dobbs, the official with whom the Wulugunaba worked most closely, fit the mold. After working in Mamprusi District from 1941 to 1949, Dobbs had helped to set up the Gonja Development scheme. Dobbs returned in early 1951 hoping to use what he had learned. Monthly diaries reveal that by the mid-1950s, like other northern DCs, he found himself managing an unprecedented level of funding for local projects. Even though he supported local government reform, he was chronically disappointed with local councils and tended to rely instead on chiefs who he thought took ‘an interest’ in development.Footnote 71 It was during this period that Dobbs and the Wulugunaba began to form a relationship based on a shared desire to transform Kpasenkpe into a gateway to the agricultural lands on the western side of the White Volta River. After the Wulugunaba had organized his constituents to clear and repair the Kpasenkpe road ‘without spending much money’, Dobbs arranged for a grant to support the larger project to bridge the river. Between December of 1954 and May of 1955, Dobbs visited the Wulugunaba and the Kpasenkpe bridge project several times a month.Footnote 72
For Dobbs, the bridge project was a way of demonstrating his ambition and vision. DCs had long spoken of ‘opening up’ western Mamprugu, and Dobbs was the first to make a concrete attempt. For the Wulugunaba Sebiyam, the bridge was a demonstration of his zeal for change and of his prominence among the head chiefs of western Mamprugu (the Kpasenkpe site having eclipsed plans by the neighboring chief of Wungu to build a bridge farther downstream). Dobbs described the Wulugunaba's comparison of the bridge to the work of the Italian engineering firm Stirling-Astaldi on the northern trunk road. At one point, the pair visited the Stirling-Astaldi contractors to ‘see if [they] were in need of any advice’.Footnote 73
The Wulugunaba's relationships with both colonial administrators and Assemblies of God missionaries also helped attract the Mass Education Programme, which relied heavily on chiefs and the recommendation of DCs.Footnote 74 In the early months of 1955, Sebiyam was able to persuade Dobbs and the Mass Education organizers to relocate the Kpasenkpe market away from the existing site, which was in an area associated with an opposing candidate for the chieftaincy, and toward a site directly behind his own palace. Attempts by northern chiefs to relocate markets have frequently been the subject of constituent protest, but Sebiyam effectively overcame any local objections, not least because he appeared to have influence with the newly interventionist administration.Footnote 75
While chief and administrator emphasized the novelty of these projects, they relied heavily on established colonial demands for unpaid labor. Officials brought machinery to blast the foundation for the bridge and provided cement for buildings, but local stones and mud served for the rest of the construction. Most strikingly, unskilled labor for construction was provided, unpaid, by the residents of Kpasenkpe and (for the bridge) from the town of Kunkwa, on the opposite side of the river.Footnote 76 Demands for communal labor highlighted tensions between the political and pragmatic goals of postwar development projects. On one hand, the provision of infrastructure and services was supposed to transform the relationships among colonial subjects, local governments, and the state. On the other, colonial officials relied on the perceived ‘traditional’ rights of chiefs to legitimize projects and cut costs. Officials hoped that chiefs would draw on existing systems of labor mobilization for harvesting and constructing compounds, rather than on systems of forced labor from previous decades. In practice, they asked few questions about how labor was raised. Oral historical evidence suggests that the Wulugunaba neither reintroduced earlier mechanisms of forced labor nor simply relied on local systems of labor mobilization.
To raise labor for the market, road, bridge and well projects of the 1950s, Sebiyam did in fact attempt to build on an existing form of chiefly labor mobilization, called nayiri kpariba, that allowed the chief to request that each farm under his jurisdiction send one worker for a one-day to one-week shift on his farms, in acknowledgement of which workers were fed and housed.Footnote 77 For development work, the Wulugunaba relied on the apparatus of nayiri kpariba, calling on subsets of his constituents in shifts to mold blocks, carry stones, and fetch water. As with nayiri kpariba, development laborers were fed a daytime meal from the chief's farms. Over the course of the 1950s, the Wulugunaba used the presence of government funding and the attendant recognition of his authority to strengthen the rights to labor on which the colonial administration sought to draw.Footnote 78 Many Kpasenkpe residents remember that under Sebiyam, demands couched in the old idiom of nayiri kpariba became more frequent and onerous. Describing how Sebiyam called residents to carry stones for the road and how he called them for nayiri kpariba, one elder argued, ‘Whether or not you liked it, you would go.’ He remembered the impression that the Wulugunaba ‘hated’ his constituents, but implied that the chief's position and connections to the government limited the expression of dissent.Footnote 79
However, a variety of Kpasenkpe residents contrasted 1950s development labor with earlier colonial labor demands by distinguishing between ‘mosigu-tuma’ (‘forced labor’) and ‘soŋ’ (help). In particular, the government had come to ‘soŋi-ti’ (‘help us’) and so it was necessary to ‘soŋi-ba’ (‘help them’).Footnote 80 It is possible that new terminology reflects a real change in the way local people thought of the rights and obligations that accompanied labor. In the late 1950s, development labor was met with a regular supply of paid labor for local skilled workers, and, of course, by the infrastructure itself. Evidence of the use of the term ‘help’ (soŋ) is difficult to interpret, however, as a simple expression of gratitude or reciprocity for development projects.Footnote 81 The Wulugunaba's brother, a pastor of the Assemblies of God, recalled that the Wulugunaba promoted concepts of ‘soŋ’ and ‘malgu’ (improvement) to encourage development labor, urging Kpasenkpe residents to ‘help’ those who had ‘come to develop the place’.Footnote 82 Kate Skinner details how the Mass Education Programme promoted the use of local-language terms like ‘malgu’ and ‘ninyesim’ for development and development work.Footnote 83 In this context, the use of soŋ by Kpasenkpe residents reveals that the Wulugunaba was able to insert himself not only into new funding structures, but also into discourses of progress, development, and self-help.
No less important were the emerging political dimensions of development projects and labor demands. In the 1950s, relationships with party structures were as important to Sebiyam's authority as ties to the colonial government. When the Kpasenkpe Primary School opened in 1947, its first teacher was an aspiring Mamprusi politician named Mumuni Bawumia, who was soon to become one of the founding members of the NPP. In the 1950s, as Bawumia developed into what Ladouceur terms ‘the most important of the politician-patrons’ in the North, he maintained close ties to Kpasenkpe. Bawumia secured the political support of the Mamprusi chiefly hierarchy in the elections of 1954 and 1956, and the NPP won by slim margins in Kpasenkpe.Footnote 84 Sebiyam family members remember the chief travelling through the villages of his jurisdiction to supervise road labor and, they thought, to prevent the intensification of political activity.Footnote 85 By the early 1960s, refusals to perform both farm labor and development labor for the chief became a well-established form of political protests by CPP supporters in the surrounding area.
CONCLUSION: PERFORMING COMMUNITY
In April of 1951, the Sandemnaab Azantilow brought a case to the chief commissioner of the Northern Territories, asking to extend the administrative boundary of Builsa to include three towns then under the jurisdiction of the Wulugunaba Sebiyam. The dispute was not new; cases regarding the borders between Builsa and Mamprusi areas had been fought periodically since the imposition of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 86 As Carola Lentz has argued, the early 1950s was an opportune time for chiefs to renegotiate local jurisdiction.Footnote 87 But, for two chiefs who had established strong ties to the late colonial administration and to emerging political parties, disputes were also risky. As this article has shown, the abolition of indirect rule, the emergence of party politics, and the injection of substantial new funding had put a premium on demonstrations of ‘progressive’ chieftaincy. A long, frustrating case about a traditional boundary appears to be just the kind of ‘feudal’ dispute that both colonial and nationalist officials wished to avoid.
In arguing their cases, both sides followed established precedents by making claims about ethnic composition and the history of chiefly succession. However, when the Northern Territories Chief Commissioner's Court dismissed the case in February 1952 (a ruling eventually upheld by the West African Court of Appeals in 1954), the decision referenced not only historical claims but also the ‘ties to the people’ that each chief could demonstrate.Footnote 88 The terms on which ‘ties to the people’ were judged – delivering projects and raising ‘communal’ or ‘self-help’ labor – showed the degree to which northern chieftaincy had become entwined with a developmentalist state. Subchiefs in the disputed areas testified to their loyalty to the Wulugunaba Sebiyam. Mumuni Bawumia, by then having left Kpasenkpe to take a position as clerk of the Mamprusi District Council, helped to organize the Mamprusi defense. In his memoirs, Bawumia recalled that they ‘quickly construct[ed] a road [to the disputed towns] … and got a school and health clinic built … to serve these isolated areas’.Footnote 89 In petitions that Bawumia then solicited, supporters argued that the dispensary and school made them ‘fully satisfied with the services of the Mamprusi Native Authority’.Footnote 90 Years later, Bawumia and Mamprusi residents alike credited these projects as a deciding factor in their eventual success in the boundary dispute.Footnote 91
Not discussed in the case were the expectations of unpaid labor on which allocations for these projects had rested and that had, moreover, laid every brick and carried every bucket of water. Even as the case proceeded, the Wulugunaba Sebiyam asked residents from Kpasenkpe and the disputed town of Kunkwa to carry stones for the bridge he and Dobbs had constructed, further securing his claims to have ‘served’ the area well. Of course, no party to the case – late colonial officials, chiefs, or party politicians – would have seen anything wrong with measuring chiefly authority in loads of stones. Over the subsequent decades, the Builsa-Mamprusi boundary dispute resurfaced at times of political and chiefly change.Footnote 92 Rather than resolving the dispute, the courts confirmed that battles over chiefly jurisdiction would be a forum for chiefs to articulate their ‘ties to the people’.
By the 1960s, however, neither the Sandemnaab Azantilow nor the Wulugunaba Sebiyam found it useful to continue to engage in the dispute. Neither jurisdictional nor political disputes became a feature of either chief's postcolonial rule. Instead, over the following decades, both chiefs became champions of successive waves of development projects, from mechanized farming in the 1970s, to road building and electrification in the 1980s and 1990s, to the community development projects of countless government and non-governmental agencies. Throughout, each relied on a familiar formula: personal interest in development paired with demonstrations that they could raise unpaid labor, glossed as ‘communal’ labor, ‘self-help’, or simply ‘participation’.
This article has argued that the continued reliance of mid-century governments on unpaid labor raised by chiefs was neither an automatic extension of colonial forced labor nor a new expression of high-modernist statecraft. ‘Communal’ or ‘self-help’ labor, like ‘development’ itself, emerged as a mutable category that offered rhetorical and practical support for the multiple and changing agendas of chiefs, officials, and politicians. The ambiguity of the category allowed for the continuation of the practice. By the 1960s, unpaid labor raised by chiefs had become an entrenched part of development practice in northern Ghana. Periodic refusals by constituents to do communal labor demonstrate the inherently political nature of the demand, but refusal was by no means the norm. While colonial and nationalist policies encouraged entrenched disputes over chiefly and governmental power, the practice of development spending instead required specific performances of solidarity and support. To officials making choices about spending, conflicts over labor served to disqualify particular areas as sites for small-scale projects. This dynamic may begin to illuminate why chiefly demands for unpaid labor were so often met, rather than rejected, by northern Ghanaians. Providing unpaid labor was not merely an unthinking demonstration of ‘community’ or fealty to chiefs, but rather an example of the ongoing invention and negotiation integral to the local politics of development.
