LA UNIÓN DE HECHO Y LA COMUNIDAD DE BIENES a) ASPECTOS GENERALES.

The conflicts over land and economic opportunity that developed in the wake of frontier expansion in the cocoa-growing regions of southwes- tern Ghana and Coˆte d’Ivoire, reflected the histories of migration and settlement that had brought thousands of migrant farmers and la- bourers into the forests in the 1950s and after, fuelling a process of agricultural expansion based on extensive cultivation and the non-re- newable riches of newly cleared forest soil.24 In Ghana, conflicts over

land turned on issues of chiefly prerogative and ‘ancestral’ claims to property and belonging that assigned rights to land according to peo- ple’s status as ‘citizens’ or ‘strangers’. Determining a person’s ancestry is an exercise in historical interpretation, in which people draw on ‘geneaological memory,’ historical narratives of ancestral deeds, and both formal and informal sources of documentation to assert and chal- lenge one another’s claims to community membership, traditional authority, and associated rights over land. Far from rigid or stable, his- torical precedents and their implications for authority and entitlement in the present have been debated and reworked as people confront new opportunities and pressures. Reaffirmed, in various ways, under both colonial and post-colonial rule, chiefs’ authority over land has drawn on and reinforced their leverage in debates over ancestry, ensuring them a level of influence in contemporary economic and political af- fairs that goes well beyond their constitutional prerogatives, which are limited to jurisdiction over ‘chieftaincy affairs’ (see chapter 22 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, 1992).

As Arhin, Boni, and many others have argued, Ghanaian chiefs have used their leverage to garner disproportionate returns from cocoa farm- ing and other land-based enterprises, particularly at the expense of pro- ducers who are (or who have come to be) considered ‘strangers’ in areas under chiefly jurisdiction. Local ‘citizens’ have been similarly dis- placed in peri-urban areas (Berry 2001:123-124; Ubink 2008a). Chief- taincy has served, accordingly, as a magnet for social contestation. Some of the most violent conflicts in recent Ghanaian history have erupted in disputes over chiefly succession, jurisdiction and/or related claims to land. Chiefs also wield considerable influence, not only with- in their respective jurisdictions, but at the highest levels of the state, drawing politicians, judges, bureaucrats and others into efforts to influ- ence and capitalise on chieftaincy politics, as well as resolving disputes. Unlike Coˆte d’Ivoire, however, where conflicts over land and belonging played directly into state politics, connections between chieftaincy, state and local governance in Ghana are multi-faceted, operating in overlap- ping but parallel spaces of political engagement and contestation. Chiefs wield power, but they don’t stand for election25– a situation that many have condemned, with reason, as placing them beyond meaning- ful public accountability, but one that also leaves room for explosive conflicts over land and authority to occur in recent years without bring- ing down the government.

In Coˆte d’Ivoire, on the other hand, where conflicts over land and entitlement also converged with debates over ancestry and origin, espe- cially in the frontier areas of expanding cocoa production, rural ten- sions converged with national political contests in the 1990s, contribut- ing to an escalation of xenophobic rhetoric that brought ‘ethnic’ hatreds

into electoral politics with disastrous consequences. Political opportu- nism certainly contributed to this process, as Ivorian scholars have been some of the first to point out. ‘Contrary to situations in which hotbeds of nationalism emerge and the state is forced to take measures to offset its effects,’ writes Akinde`s, ‘in Coˆte d’Ivoire, …the state itself is responsible for the retribalisation’ of political discourse and participa- tion (Akinde`s 2004:26). At the same time, one might argue that the force of popular response to the ugly rhetoric of ‘ivoirite’ owed as much to the convergence of state politics with the crisis in the cocoa-growing areas and the neo-liberal insistence that all economic and political ‘re- forms’ in Africa conform to a single model of ‘open’ markets and mul- ti-party elections, as is owed to the power of opportunistic politicians to manipulate the popular mind. Most of these processes were also at work in Ghana, but they came together differently, allowing neo-liberal advocates to claim that country as something of a ‘success’ – as long as they focus attention on the right areas of economic and political en- gagement.

Notes

1 The present essay is part of a larger study that seeks to explore the salience of ‘his- tory’ in local struggles over property and power in different parts of Ghana and some of its francophone neighbours. Using case studies from my own and others’ re- search, I compare local histories of resource access, use, and control in Ghana and neighbouring francophone countries – asking how understandings of the past figure in contemporary economic and political affairs, and how local histories of economic and political change have shaped West Africans’ experiences with neo-liberalism. In doing so, I am interested both in how global hegemony of neo-liberalism has influ- enced people’s lives in West Africa, but also in how the neo-liberal project itself has been reworked through encounters with West African political economies.

2 Reaching a peak in the mid-1960s, cocoa production in Ghana declined for the next twenty years, and remained well below previous levels for the rest of the twentieth century. In Coˆte d’Ivoire, cocoa output continued to expand into the early 1980s, gen- erating increases in export earnings despite steep declines in world market prices. 3 Much of her argument rests, empirically, on demonstrating that each regime em-

ployed different strategies in different regions of their country, depending on the structure of rural society and the strength or weakness of rural elites.

4 The term ‘allochthones’ refers to Ivorian nationals who do not come from the local area and are therefore not considered to be autochtones.

5 Estimates of people killed in these riots run from several hundred to as many as 4,000 (Boone 2003:207, 220; Stryker 1970:134).

6 The stool is the symbol of chiefly office in Akan-speaking areas in Ghana and south- eastern Coˆte d’Ivoire. When the British established colonial rule in Asante, they in- corporated ‘loyal’ chiefs into the colonial administration, endorsing chiefs’ authority over their ‘subjects’ as well as the lands attached to their stools. Invoking their tradi- tional right to a share of anything of value (game, timber, nuggets of gold) found on stool land, chiefs argued that a farmer who ‘found’ value by growing cocoa outside

the jurisdiction of his/her own stool, should give part of the proceeds to the stool whose land s/he cultivated. These claims were accepted by colonial officials as legiti- mate under ‘native customary law’ and incorporated into colonial policy on land. For further information and examples, see Berry 2001.

7 A similar point is made by Lund 2002:32 and passim.

8 Boni 2006; Arhin 1986; compare Nugent 2002 and Mensah 1996 on Volta Region. Similar disputes had been common in the early decades of the twentieth century, in the older cocoa growing areas of Asante and Eastern Regions (Berry 2001:42-43; Rathbone 1993:ch. 13; Simensen 1975a:201ff).

9 Such contributions were by no means automatic, however. For studies of conjugal la- bour and household economies in cocoa growing areas, see, inter alia, Allman and Tashjian 2000; Clark 1999; Mikell 1985; Okali 1983.

10 ‘(…) une vielle plantation est comme une vielle femme qui meurt. Les medicaments couteraient trop pour la maintenir en vie. Il vaut mieux garder les medicaments pour la jeune femme’ (Ruf 1991:107).

11 For more on transnational migration in the region, and the 1983 refugee crisis in Ghana, see text following footnote below.

12 One study estimated that reductions in Ghana’s agricultural labour force resulting from emigration to Nigeria, contributed significantly to declining food output from 1975 on (Tabatabai 1988:720ff).

13 On the history of the NLM, see Allman 1993. Nkrumah‘s relationships with Gha- naian chiefs are discussed in Arhin 1993 and 2001, Boone 2003, and Rathbone 2000. See also Dunn and Robertson 1973.

14 Never fully abrogated during the First Republic despite the state’s energetic appro- priation of substantial tracts of both urban and forest land ‘in the public interest,’ the principle that ‘stool and skin lands shall vest in their respective stools’ has been reaf- firmed in every subsequent constitution, and interpreted more broadly by successive regimes. For a useful discussion of the legal and practical implications of the differ- ence between land appropriated ‘for public purposes’ and ‘in the public interest,’ see Kotey 2002. The widening of the effective scope of chiefly authority through subtle changes in the wording of later constitutions is discussed in Arhin 2001. On the spread of the Akan chieftaincy model to other regions of Ghana, and its implications for the distribution of power and practices of governance in recent years, see Arhin 2001:ch. 5.

15 Stools’ authority over land, described in legal parlance as allodial (ultimate) title, has been reaffirmed in each of Ghana’s last three constitutions. Under colonial laws, the state could acquire land needed ‘for public purposes,’ powers that were reaffirmed and elaborated in the State Lands Act (125) and the Administration of Lands Act (123) of 1962. Act 125 transfers allodial title to the state. Under Act 123, ‘the administration and management of ‘‘stool land’’ is vested in the state in trust for the stool,’ to be used in the public interest (Kotey 2002:205). State use of such lands has been a sub- ject of much controversy in recent years (Kasanga and Kotey 2001; Kotey 2002). 16 Like the Cocoa Marketing Board in Ghana, the Caisse de Stabilisation held a mono-

poly over sales of cocoa and coffee to foreign buyers, and used its control to appropri- ate the major part of export crop revenues for the ruling party and the state. For de- tails and analysis, see Crook 1990:650.

17 Houphouet and the PDCI worked closely with French officials and investors, main- taining an open door to foreign investment as well as immigrant labour, working with its francophone neighbours to maintain a common currency pegged to the French franc, negotiating protected quotas for Ivorian exports to France, and appoint- ing French officials to some of the most senior positions in the Ivorian administra- tion. The open door was not limited to senior government positions, but applied at

all levels of the Ivorian economy. In 1976, ‘foreign Africans accounted for 57% of all jobs in the urban ‘‘informal and artisan’’ sector, …42% in the…"unskilled modern sector’’’ and ‘a staggering 72.7% of all paid jobs’ in the primary sector in 1971 (Blion and Bredeloup 1997; Crook 1991b:225).

18 The practice of paying an estate tax to the stool derives from pre-colonial Asante, and was a subject of intense debate during the colonial era. See, e.g. Arhin 1974; Berry 2001:24, 40.

19 Akinde`s 2004:12-16; Losch 2000; and others; Memel-Fote´ 1997, 1999.

20 Cocoa income rose from 25 per cent of total export earnings in 1990 to 50 per cent in 2000 (IMF, World Economic Outlook data base, http://www.imf.org/external/ns/ cs.aspx?id=28).

21 A former senior official of the IMF, Ouattara had lived abroad for many years, return- ing to Coˆte d’Ivoire in the early 1990s, at the behest of his employers, to deal with the worsening economic and financial situation.

22 In responding to these claims, Ouattara himself has given different accounts of his family’s history (Akinde`s 2004:36-39).

23 Passed at the end of December 1998, Loi no. 98-750 sur le Domaine foncier rural has been credited with helping bring about Coˆte d’Ivoire‘s first military coup in 1999, and the escalation of violent political struggle in the early years of the new mil- lennium. In addition to restricting ownership to Ivorian nationals, the law mandates a process for recognising and registering individuals’ ‘customary’ rights of ownership which is so complex and cumbersome that very few rural dwellers are likely to be able to complete it. All land which has not been so registered within ten years (by the end of 2008) will revert to the national domain, effectively nullifying the legalisa- tion of customary rights as private property (Chauveau 2002).

24 Francois Ruf’s term ‘forest rent,’ coined to describe the gains from cocoa and other crops grown on newly cleared forest soil, has been taken up by others (Austin 2005; Chauveau and Le´onard 1996; Ruf 1995).

25 Chiefs are not chosen to succeed to stools on the basis of open popular elections nor, under the current Constitution, are they allowed to stand for election to public of- fices. They may hold positions in the civil service, if their qualifications meet those required of other public employees.