Disguising chiefs and god as history: Questions on the acephalousness of LoDagaa politics and religion
This article examines two periods in the historiography and ethnography of the LoDagaa of northern Ghana and analyses the similarities between them. In the late 1920s the institution of chieftaincy was written into LoDagaa history by colonial administrators, only two decades after they themselves ha...
| Published in: | Africa |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1996
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| In: |
Africa
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| Further subjects: | B
Historiography
B Great Britain B Tradition B Colonialism B Political elite B People B Religion B Catholicism B Tree trunk Ethnology B Ruling system |
| Summary: | This article examines two periods in the historiography and ethnography of the LoDagaa of northern Ghana and analyses the similarities between them. In the late 1920s the institution of chieftaincy was written into LoDagaa history by colonial administrators, only two decades after they themselves had created that institution in a society they had once considered bereft of political authority. By the early 1930s colonial administrators had created a historical fiction, namely that chiefs had always existed among the LoDagaa, despite the view of a generation of earlier officers that there had been no chiefs prior to the arrival of the British....This finessing of the past has bequeathed ambiguities and contradictions evident in contemporary attitudes toward the position of chiefs among the LoDagaa. Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s the indigenous clergy among the LoDagaa, who had taken over from the missionaries in the 1960s, began to reassess the nature of god in indigenous religious thought in order to narrow the distance between LoDagaa culture and Catholicism. The idea of inculturation, which grew after the Second Vatican Council, was the specific impetus for such enquiries. LoDagaa priests re-examined indigenous religion and discovered the existence of belief in and worship of a single, absolute deity which had been neglected by earlier missionaries and ethnographers....While earlier political revisions were finessed by colonial officers, with the acquiescence of colonial chiefs, bent on changing LoDagaa culture and history for administrative convenience, the latter revisionists were seemingly concerned with defending and preserving indigenous culture rather than changing it. However, the notion of the pre-missionary worship of god is as much a historical fiction as the idea of the existence of chiefs in the pre-colonial period. (Africa/DÜI, gekürzt) |
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| ISSN: | 0001-9720 |
| Contains: | In: Africa
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