Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 30 onds and Boundaries in orthern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso Edited by Sten Hagberg & Alexis B. Tengan UPPSALA 2000 ABSTRACT Hagberg, Sten; Tengan, Alexis B. (editors) Bonds and Boundaries in Northern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 30. 197 pp. Uppsala 2000. ISBN 91-554-4770-8. The volume contains ten essays that are concerned with the problem ofboundaries, and of the bonds that overcome them in northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso. It explores cosmological notions of space, colonial and postcolonial representations and social practices. All the essays integrate, though in various ways, cosmological and geographical notions of space, although the topics vary from identity, religion and marriage to politics, history and farming in this frontier region. Most of the essays were initially written for an international seminar in Gaoua (Burkina Faso) in 1998, which aimed at crossing the boundaries, be they national, socio-cultural, linguistic, political or religious ones by bringing together some scholars of different cultural, postcolonial and academic environments. © Department of Cultural Anthropology & Ethnology and the authors 2000 ISSN 0348-5099 ISBN 91-554-4770-8 Typesetting: Mikael Brandstrom Printed in Sweden by Elanders Gotab, Stockholm 2000 Distributor: Uppsala University Library, Box 510, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Preface 7 Jan Ovesen Introduction: Coping with Cosmology and Geography 9 Sten Hagberg andAlexis B. Jengan Resume en fran9ais: gerer cosmologie et geographie 31 Sten Hagberg andAlexis B. Jengan Part I: Lived Cosmologies, Written Geographies Contribution al'histoire du peuplement de la province du Poni au Burkina Faso 41 Madeleine Pere Aper9u de la mise en place du peuplement kasena du Burkina Faso 53 Moustapha Gomgnimbou Changing Political Boundaries: The Case ofAsante 1700 - 1960 71 BOIjito Abayie Boaten I Part II: Bonds and Boundaries of Belonging Space, Bonds and Social Order: Dagara House-based Social System 87 Alexis B. Jengan 5 "A woman is someone's child": Women and Social and Domestic Space among the Kasena 105 Ann Cassiman Dagara Christian Conversion in Terms of Personal Memory 133 EdwaldB. Rmgan Part Ill: Contested Bonds, Redefined Boundaries La problematique de la dation du nom chez les Dagara du Burkina Faso 147 NayireEvariste Poda Strangers, Citizens, Friends: Fulbe Agro-pastoralists in Western Burkina Faso 159 Sten Hagberg Drawing or Bridging Boundaries? Agricultural Extension in the Upper West Region of Ghana 181 Joost Dessein List of Contributors 197 6 fan Ovesen This volume is the result of a seminar entitled 'Terre et pouvoir contestes. Bonds and boundaries in Northern Ghana/Southern Burkina Faso'. The seminar was held in July 1998 in the provincial town of Gaoua in southwestern Burkina Faso. It was an important event in the long-term academic cooperation that the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University has with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Catholic University ofLeuven, Belgium and with Institut des Sciences des Societes (INSS) under the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique (CNRST) of Burkina Faso. For the participants in the seminar, the event was a new and very fruitful experience in practical academic cooperation between African and European anthropology/social science departments. It represented a conscious postcolonial effort to demolish scholarly, linguistic and administrative barriers erected as a consequence of the ethnically and culturally arbitrary border between British and French colonial territory and the resulting international boundary between present­ day Ghana and Burkina Faso. The legacy of that colonial order implied, among other things, that our deliberations were necessarily bilingual. The drawbacks of this practical inconvenience were richly compensated by the opportunity which the seminar created for researchers from the four countries to meet for the first time and exchange experiences and ideas on work carried out-often on related problems and among identical ethnic groups-on either side of the border and in different national academic traditions. By the end of the seminar, I think we all felt we had taken a small step towards l'anthropologie sansfrontieres. The considerable work involved in organising the seminar was done mainly by the editors, Sten Hagberg (Uppsala) and Alexis Tengan (Leuven); our colleagues at INSS in Ouagadougou, Evariste Poda and Moustapha Gomgnimbou, took care 7 ofimportant practical preparations surplace. Professor Rene Devisch ofthe Leuven anthropology department contributed to both the scholarly and the practical planning. To organise an international seminar in a country other than one's own naturally requires the consent of the authorities of the host country. We are grateful for the positive attitude shown by the Burkinabe authorities, notably the Ministry of Education (Ministere des Enseignements Secondaire, Superieur et de la Recherche Scientifique), the CNRST, and the INSS; we particularly wish to acknowledge both moral and invaluable practical support from the director of the INSS, Dr Basile Guissou. The official hospitality extended by the local authorities at Gaoua, notably the offices of le haut-commissaire, le prejet and le maire, is also gratefully acknowledged. The decision to hold a seminar dealing with aspects of culture and society in Ghana and Burkina Faso, not in the capital of either country, but in the small Burkinabe town of Gaoua, very close to the Ghanaian border, was taken in order to both be in the cultural milieu that was the focus of the seminar, and, at least symbolically, to convey to the local population our desire to bring the scholarly discourse back to the environment from which much of the empirical data for our research was gained in the first place. On a personal note, I would like to add that an added attraction of Gaoua as the location for the seminar was the vicinity to the village of Gbomblora, where I spent some eight months doing fieldwork in 1984; whenever I have since returned for shorter visits, I have been enjamille, and I was both happy and proud to be able to convey an invitation to the seminar participants to visit the village; my close friend Biwante Kambou and his relatives and neighbours entertained us all lavishly with sorghum beer and food, music and dance. I like to think that the other participants enjoyed themselves as much as I did. Apart from the scholarly merits ofthe present volume, we would also like to see its significance as a demonstration of the practical possibility of establishing a dialogue between scholars ofdifferent continents and belonging to different national academic traditions. It may serve as a reminder that anthropology today is no longer the preserve of western scholars studying postcolonial others for the benefit of a western academic audience, but that it is a discipline as universal, and as culturally varied, as its subject matter itself. Uppsala, June 2000 8 Introducti pin with __...... m logyan _~'lbJl_raphy Sten Hagberg & Alexis B. Tengan In the spring of 1961, political relations were strained between Felix Houphouet­ Boigny and Maurice Yameogo, presidents of the newly independent states of Ivory Coast and Upper Volta, respectively (Balima 1996). The reason was divergent opinions regarding customs policies. Yameogo accused Houphouet-Boigny oftaking the lion's share ofcustoms revenues between the two countries. President Yameogo therefore wanted to demonstrate that he was not a vassal to the economically and politically more powerful southern neighbour. He entered into a dialogue with the Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah and they met in Accra in May 1961. Some weeks later (8 June) it was announced that all customs barriers between Upper Volta and Ghana would be lifted. A few days later the two presidents met again but now in Ouagadougou. Salfo-Albert Balima, who served as translator, narrates: President Yameogo opens the session and brilliantly welcomes the President of Ghana and his suite. He continues by a skilful tirade about the necessary union ofall Africans, without exclusion, to solve their problems, being the consequences ofthe misdeeds ofcolonialists and their friends, the impenitent and shameless imperialists. To conclude, President Yameogo confesses: he needs a loan of 10 billions CFA francs to solve an impasse. The President of Ghana, who has listened with lively attention to all the speech of the President of Upper-Volta, without taking any written note, replies with flegmatic calm, and without comment. -1 agree! And that our colleagues of Upper-Volta and Ghana take note and give satisfaction to my brother the president ofUpper-Volta. (Balima 1996:300, translation ours) President Yameogo thereafter suggested that an official ceremony should take place to symbolically demonstrate that the two presidents would destroy the artificial boundary separating the countries. It was decided that the ceremony should take place in Paga, a village situated in-between the two countries. In the following days 9 S. Hagberg & A.B. Tengan the two delegations elaborated an agreement to be signed 17 June 1961. Ten days later the boundary separating Upper Volta and Ghana was symbolically destroyed at the ceremony in Paga. Yet, in the year to come President Yameogo's political relations with President Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast improved