building for the future? investment, land reform and the contingencies of ownership in contemporary...

World Development Vol. 37, No. 8, pp. 1370–1378, 2009� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

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www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddevdoi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2008.08.017

Building for the Future? Investment, Land Reform

and the Contingencies of Ownership

in Contemporary Ghana

SARA BERRY *

Johns Hopkins University, MD, USA

Summary. — Case studies of individual investments in tree crops and houses illustrate recent changes in social and economic differen-tiation among families and communities in Asante Region, Ghana, and their implications for recent debates over state-led land reformversus community-led land reform. Seeking efficiency, neoliberal land reforms transfer land from state to private ownership, as well astenure reforms designed to strengthen owners’ rights. By treating communities as owners, reforms benefit the poor as well as the well-to-do. In Ghana and other West African countries, privatization may also work in the opposite direction—reinforcing inequalities withincommunities, and encouraging claims to land based on origin and indigeneity.� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Key words — Ghana, Africa, land reform, investment, remittances, community

*Final revision accepted: August 7, 2008.

1. INTRODUCTION

Since the 1980s, international financial institutions and ma-jor donor governments have pressed West African states to lib-eralize their economies, deregulating markets, dismantlingcontrols on foreign trade and investment, downsizing the state,and privatizing ownership of assets and enterprises. Written offin the 1970s as misguided state regulation that stifled economicdevelopment rather than spreading its benefits, ‘‘land reform”reappeared on the policy agenda in the 1980s, but with a newmeaning. Rather than state-led redistribution of land from richto poor, neoliberal policy-makers urged governments to trans-fer state-owned land to private ownership, arguing that thiswould increase productivity by stimulating land markets andpromoting private investment in land-based development.Asked, in effect, to organize their own dispossession, some gov-ernment officials took the opportunity to acquire state-ownedland for themselves, or their relatives and associates, in theircapacity as private citizens. In many cases, private ownersdid not invest in more productive forms of land use, but simplyheld newly acquired land as a speculative investment, or leasedit out to commercial companies that evicted local users, clearedforests, mined soil and valuable minerals, and left the land lessproductive than they found it. Understandably dismayed bythese developments, researchers and policy analysts are begin-ning to advocate community-led land reform as a preferablealternative to the kind of state-led privatization carried out inmany post-socialist and/or developing economies during the1980s–90s (Sikor & Muller, 2009).

Community-led land reform, like community-based re-source management, appears to offer a democratic alternativeto state-led reforms that ignore ordinary people’s concerns orreduce their access to land. Because communities are localizedand comprise fewer people than regions or countries, commu-nity institutions are likely to allow for greater grassroots par-ticipation and be better informed about local environmentsthan are state bureaucracies and ruling national regimes.Community-led land reforms are therefore likely to be moreequitable, and lead to more sustainable forms of resourcemanagement than top-down policies imposed by the state.

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By engaging diverse local interests in the design and imple-mentation of land reform programs, Sikor and Muller arguethat, community-led land reform is likely to be more flexiblethan land reform carried out by the state. While these assump-tions are certainly plausible, recent experience suggests thatthey need to be carefully examined with reference to particularlocal contexts. Whether initiated by the state or undertaken inresponse to local demands, programs that transfer land frompublic to private control often benefit some people and whileexcluding others, reinforcing existing inequalities and/or creat-ing new ones within communities as well as among them.

In West Africa, where competition over land is intense andcommunities are not all egalitarian, or necessarily local, com-munity control over land and land tenure arrangements can beas disruptive or arbitrarily exclusionary as control by the state.In the following discussion, I develop and illustrate thesepoints with examples taken from on-going research on landclaims and socio-economic change in selected localities in theAshanti Region of Ghana. 1 Rather than trace the effects ofparticular land reform policies, the case studies cited below fo-cus on selected forms of land use—specifically, individuals’investments in land-based assets such as houses and treecrops—to examine some of the ways in which neoliberal pol-icies and changing economic and political conditions arereshaping Ghanaian communities and patterns of localauthority. Following a brief overview of land tenure policiesin Ghana after independence, evidence from the case studiesis used to illustrate changing configurations of land-based as-set formation, local governance, and family and communityrelations, and discuss their implications for land tenure prac-tices and directions of future reform. 2

2. LAND REFORM IN GHANA

Land reform in Ghana is best thought of as an on-goingprocess rather than as a one-time comprehensive effort to

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE? INVESTMENT, LAND REFORM AND THE CONTINGENCIES OF OWNERSHIP 1371

restructure the country’s system of land holding and tenurearrangements. Introducing the new National Land Policy,published in 1999, the Minister of Land and Forestry notedthat it was ‘‘the first time in the history of this country thata comprehensive land policy has been formulated” (Ghana,1999, p. i). A policy brief rather than a program of action,the National Land Policy is as much a reflection of Ghana’scomplex history of land transactions and arrangements as ablueprint for future reform. After outlining a ‘‘framework”and ‘‘guidelines” for policy reform, the document details a ser-ies of ‘‘policy actions” to be implemented ‘‘in the short, med-ium and long-term” (Ghana, 1999, p. 15). Many of the actionsare hortatory rather than practical, and the report specifies notime frame for implementation. The document concludes withan Appendix listing some 90 pieces of legislation, enacted dur-ing 1952–98 and currently in force, related to land tenure andnatural resource management, with a note that ‘‘this List is byno means exhaustive”(Ghana, 1999, p. 28).

Of particular relevance to the following discussion are theparagraphs in the National Land Policy which reaffirm gov-ernment’s recognition of customary land usages and titles, ordeclare the state’s intention to ‘‘collaborate with traditionalauthorities and other stakeholders” to promote ‘‘ecosystemmaintenance [and] biodiversity conservation” (Ghana, 1999,p. 15), return lands acquired but never used by the state totheir original owners (Ghana, 1999, p. 10), ‘‘harmonies (sic)and streamline customary practices”, and develop ‘‘land man-agement knowledge and skills among stool, skin, clan andfamily landowners. . ..” (Ghana, 1999, p. 16). Far fromstraightforwardly progressive or egalitarian, the Policy’semphasis on custom and community-level participation begsa complex and contested set of questions about the historyand meaning of land ownership, and relations between land,local authority, and community membership.

Following an abortive early move to claim all ‘‘vacant andunowned” land for the British Crown ‘‘by right of conquest,”colonial authorities accepted the argument put forward byleading western-educated Ghanaian clergymen and lawyersthat there was no ‘‘vacant” land for the state to appropriatebecause land was already ‘‘owned [by] the natives, under thejurisdiction of the native chiefs” (Sarbah, 1968, p. 56). Overtime, this argument was interpreted to mean that land was per-manently vested in public—that is, chiefly—offices (or‘‘stools”) and could not be alienated, although rights of pos-session and use could be transferred from one person to an-other (Berry, 1993, 105ff, 2001, p. 6). In his magisterial studyof customary land law and the courts, Woodman (1996,76ff) concluded that since modern courts treat ‘‘customaryfreehold” as tantamount to private ownership, the reversion-ary rights of customary holders have become ineffective. Whilethis may be true in the majority of court rulings, many casesnever reach the courts and even those that do often turn onelusive questions of ‘‘traditional” evidence that complicatethe effects of court practice. Customary laws and courts weredisbanded after independence, but plural rules and land tenurearrangements continue to figure in contemporary practice, notonly through Constitutional recognition of ‘‘traditional” landownership, but also through judicial practice, particularly inregard to questions of evidence. Both before and beyond thecourts, ‘‘customary” claims to ownership remain subjects ofintense contestation (Berry, 2001, 82–92 (chap. 6); Kotey,2002; Lentz, 2001; Lund, 2008).

Following independence, Nkrumah confiscated some stoollands, vesting them in the President’s office, but his govern-ment stopped short of abolishing customary claims altogether.After Nkrumah’s downfall in 1966, his successors restored the

confiscated lands to their chiefly owners, and subsequent con-stitutions have reaffirmed the principle that ‘‘all stool and skinlands are vested in the appropriate stools on behalf of, and intrust for the subjects of the stool in accordance with customaryusage” (Ghana, 1992, Art. 267(1)). In 1979, these principleswere extended to Ghana’s northern regions, where land hadhitherto been treated as the property of the state (Kasanga,1996; Lund, 2008; Ninsin, 1989, pp. 176, 177). Under the pres-ent Constitution, adopted eight years after Ghana committeditself to structural adjustment, freehold ownership of stoollands is explicitly prohibited: ‘‘no interest in, or right over,any stool land in Ghana shall be created which vests in anyperson or body of persons a freehold interest howsoeverdescribed” (Ghana, 1992, Art. 267(5)). Chiefs are not freehold-ers either: as occupants of chiefly offices, they hold allodial ti-tle to lands vested in their stools, which are inalienable but notexclusive. Members of the community—families, clans, andindividuals—are entitled to use any portion of stool land thatis not being used by someone else. ‘‘Strangers” must obtainpermission to use and/or occupy stool land from the chiefand any other community member who may hold concurrentrights to the land in question. Rights of land use and posses-sion are generally heritable, but chiefs claim authority to con-sent to most land transactions within their respectivejurisdictions. 3

In short, claims to land ‘‘ownership” are linked to questionsof community membership as well as to histories of past trans-actions. Both turn on interpretations of custom and historicalprecedent which, like all historical accounts, are open to ques-tion and debate. Far from stabilizing, simplifying, or democra-tizing patterns of land holding and ownership, legal andjudicial recognition of customary claims to land and commu-nity membership tend to reproduce layered claims to land andrecurring disputes over custom and historical precedent (Ber-ry, 2001; Lund, 2008; Tipple, Korboe, Willis, & Garrod,1998; and many others). In these circumstances, whether thegovernment’s current policy of returning state-held lands(many of them improperly acquired by previous regimes) to‘‘the original owners” is seen as a progressive response to com-munity-based demands, or a recipe for land concentration andconflict, depends on whom one asks. I will return to this ques-tion below, after taking a look at some current patterns ofland use and their implications for changing relations of prop-erty, authority, and belonging.

3. CASE STUDIES

To explore the implications of Ghana’s complex land tenurearrangements for changing patterns of land use, local gover-nance, and social relations, this section presents recent evi-dence on individual investments in two kinds of land-basedassets—houses and tree crops. Long prominent in the assetportfolios of ordinary Ghanaians, tree crops and houses havereemerged as significant outlets for individual savings in theyears since Ghana initiated its first structural adjustment pro-gram in 1984. 4 Plantings of cocoa, Ghana’s premier exportcrop, revived in the mid-1980s, following a twenty year de-cline, rising by ca 50% between 1985 and the end of the decadealthough they did not reach the level of the early 1960s until2004. During 1993–2004, total outlays on construction roseby 55% in real terms, 80% of them used to build houses (Ary-eetey, Harrigan, & Nissanke, 2000; ISSER, 2001, p. 5; IMF;WEO). Because of their historical importance, investmentsin houses and tree crops serve to illustrate changing linkagesbetween land use and land tenure over time. Durable and fixed

1372 WORLD DEVELOPMENT

to the land they stand on, trees and houses accumulate histo-ries of ownership, management, and use which both reflectand influence broader changes in tenure arrangements, eco-nomic conditions, and governing institutions and practices.Both have figured prominently in processes of socioeconomicdifferentiation, intergenerational transmissions of property,and associated transformations in relations of kinship andcommunity. 5 Viewed against the experiences of the past, re-cent patterns of investment in houses and tree crops help toshed light on the implications of state-led privatization forland use and tenure, and vice versa.

Evidence discussed in the following pages was collectedthrough two small-scale studies carried out in the Ashanti Re-gion of Ghana in the summer of 2002. Information on hous-ing comes from a re-study of one periurban community nearKumasi which grew from a village, when I first surveyed it in1993, to a densely built suburb nine years later. Through thegood offices of the Ashanti Regional Tree Growers Associa-tion (ARTGA, an informal, unfunded network of small-scalegrowers), I also carried out a pilot study of small-scale teakfarms, interviewing members of ARTGA and visiting someof their farms, to learn about their experiments with teakand other timber species as a new kind of cash crop. 6 Unliketeak which is a relatively recent introduction to Ghana’s tree-growing economy, investment in housing has a long andwidespread history. In the past, thousands of cocoa farmersused part of their proceeds to build houses, often in theirhome towns or cities, rather than in villages located near theirfarms, and most of the teak growers I interviewed had builtone or more houses before they decided to experiment withteak.

In contrast to the periurban village, where housing domi-nated the landscape and there was little vacant land left, theteak farms I visited were located in rural areas, anywhere from15 to 150 km from Kumasi, on land which the grower hadeither inherited or bought for the purpose of planting teak.Whether bordering the city or 50 km away, however, mostland in Asante has been farmed within living memory. Onceheavily forested, Ashanti Region was extensively planted incocoa during the first half of the 20th century, and today thereis little old growth forest to be found. During the 1980s–90s,substantial progress was made in developing rural infrastruc-ture, but many villages still lack basic amenities such as elec-tricity, piped water, and paved roads. Transportation isreadily available on paved roads, but irregular away fromthem: taxis and vans ran frequently between A___ and the cen-ter of Kumasi, but I usually had to hire a car or taxi in town toget to a teak farm, often accompanied by the grower who alsolived and worked in the city.

Land reform was not uppermost in the minds of my infor-mants when we discussed their investments in houses and teak.Nearly all the houses and about half the teak farms had beenbuilt on land which the owner had purchased in order to buildor plant trees. Among those who did not pay for their land, afew said they had been given land by a chief with whom theyhad family ties or personal connections; the rest had obtainedpermission from their relatives to build or plant on a portionof family land. (Six of the 32 house owners whom I inter-viewed in A___ had inherited the houses they lived in; two oth-ers had inherited houses that were occupied by other people).No one reported having encountered much difficulty inobtaining land to build or plant on, nor did anyone seem un-duly worried about the security of their own tenure, althoughsome people did express concern for the position of their fu-ture heirs. Rather than security of tenure, growers explained,‘‘our problem is money!”

To finance the construction of a house or the establishmentof a teak farm, one needs either ready access to affordable creditor plenty of cash. Private mortgage lending is extremely limitedin Ghana: banks and other formal lending institutions chargeinterest rates of 33–50% per annum, and require borrowers toprovide secure collateral in order to obtain a loan at all. 7 Per-sonal loans are also hard to come by, not least because they arerisky—both for the lender who may find it difficult to pressfamily members or friends to repay, and for the borrowerwho may discover that a lender considers himself/herselfpart-owner of the house or farm to which s/he has contributed.For teak growers, access to credit is further constrained by dis-parities between the time horizons of lenders and the life cycleof the trees. Trees take anywhere from 10 to 25 years to mature,depending on their intended use, and must be weeded andpruned on a regular basis to be of marketable quality at thetime of harvest. ‘‘Teak is not a poor man’s crop,” growers fre-quently observed. Most of my informants were middle-aged orelderly men and women, who held steady jobs, ran other busi-nesses, or received pensions, and had used part of their earningsto establish their farms. A few had borrowed money from aRural Bank, only to discover that the loans came due long be-fore the trees had reached marketable size. 8

With limited access to affordable credit, investors have beenobliged either to pay the costs of construction or cultivationout of their own pockets, or find ways to reduce or defer pay-ment for materials and labor. Many people invest in install-ments, adding slowly to a house or farm as their means (andplant growth patterns) permit. Others turn to family membersor social dependents to assist with farm work or construction,supervise hired workers or contractors, and/or manage finan-cial transactions on behalf of absent investors. Ghanaianexpatriates faced particular difficulties in monitoring invest-ments at a distance, since money sent to relatives in Ghanais likely to be used for immediate needs, rather than be spenton asset formation (Ammassari, 2004b, p. 22; Osili, 2004). Asthe numbers of Ghanaians seeking employment and opportu-nity abroad has risen in recent years, with a corresponding in-crease in the volume of remittances flowing into Ghana,specialists have emerged to cater to investors’ needs. 9 One res-ident of A____ said that his sister had employed a contractor‘‘who builds houses for Ghanaians living abroad” to put upthree new buildings for her in A____. 10 In another case achief, who commuted between her home in Canada and herancestral community in Ghana, said that she often helpedher constituents to arrange international money transfers (Ber-ry, 2001, p. 141). Whether or not they used the services of suchfacilitators, however, most of my informants had turned toother family members, at some point, to assist in managingtheir investments at home.

For teak growers, the key to producing a successful farm islabor—not only to clear land and plant seedlings initially, butalso to clear weeds and prune trees at regular intervals, so thatthe trunks grow straight enough to bring good prices whenthey are sold. If the grower relies entirely on hired labor, s/he must be in a position to pay them several times a yearfor anywhere from 10 to 25 years, before the trees can be har-vested. 11 For small-scale growers, the resulting cash flowproblems can be daunting, and many seek alternative laborarrangements to supplement hired labor or replace it entirely.Newly established plots of teak may be temporarily ‘‘given” tolocal farmers, who plant food crops among the young seed-lings and, in principle, cultivate the trees as they weed theirown crops. Growers who had established their farms on familyland also enlisted the help of relatives who were living nearby,both to work on the farm and to supervise hired laborers.


Employing sharecroppers or relatives instead of hired laborsometimes substitutes one kind of cash flow problem for an-other. Relatives who help on the farm may not ask for wages,but they are likely to expect assistance with daily expenses, forfood, medicine, school fees, etc., on a recurring basis. Duringone farm visit, the grower—a construction worker whose farmwas on family land an hour’s drive from Kumasi—publiclydistributed chop money to several brothers who helped onhis farm, gave his sister money to pay hired farm workers,and, after lengthy negotiations, transported a sister-in-law sev-eral miles to buy medicine, which he paid for, on our way backto the city. House owners also rely on family members to keepan eye on building contractors while houses are under con-struction, handle financial transfers, and look after (partly)completed houses on behalf of their absentee owners. A fewhouses in A____ had been built expressly as rental propertiesand individual rooms were rented out in others, but most wereoccupied, at least in part, by the owner(s) and/or members oftheir families. Among the houses built by absentee owners,nearly all were occupied by one or more of the owner’s rela-tives, who paid no rent but ‘‘took care” of the house for theirabsent kin. 12

4. ‘‘OWNERSHIP IS A CONDITION FORINVESTMENT, OR IS IT VICE VERSA?

Preoccupied with their immediate needs for labor, workingcapital, and managerial assistance, few of the investors I inter-viewed expressed concern that their strategies for managingthe costs of capital formation and maintenance might affecttheir ownership of the assets themselves. Past experience sug-gests, however, that—partly because of their longevity—assetssuch as houses and tree crops often accumulate claims andclaimants over time, as different people participate in their cre-ation, maintenance, and use. Changes in the physical form of abuilding or tree farm involve interactions among people whocreate, alter, use, repair, or exchange them, and these interac-tions may affect their relations with one another, not only inthe short run but also in the future. In practice, claims to prop-erty are often inflected with histories of social interaction,especially in the case of durable assets such as houses andtrees. Ownership, in other words, is not so much a legal factas a social process: how an asset is made, deployed, and trans-ferred affects the way it is owned, and vice versa.

The contingent politics of ownership and access echoed inmy discussions with both teak growers and suburban resi-dents. Growers who had planted teak on family land invari-ably declared, at some point in the conversation, that ‘‘theland is for the family, but the trees are for me.” The historyof cocoa and other tree crop cultivation in Ghana suggests,however, that such understandings may change over time.The men who produced Ghana’s legendary cocoa economy re-lied heavily on assistance from their wives and children to de-velop and maintain their farms. As cocoa trees matured, wivesand children began to claim, sometimes successfully, that theiryears of unpaid labor entitled them to part ownership of thetrees (Allman & Tashjian, 2000, p. 107; Okali, 1983, 110ff).Such cases illustrate the more general point that relations be-tween ownership and investment may be interactive ratherthan sequential. Over time, the spread of cocoa and other treecrops worked to commercialize transactions in rights to landwithout necessarily separating land ownership from familyand/or community politics. Rather than transferring exclusiverights of ownership from one party to another, land transac-tions often serve as occasions for people to reopen questions

of entitlement and jurisdiction which had apparently been set-tled in the past or have been put in jeopardy by recent events.In such cases, transactions define their conditions rather thanthe other way around. As Jean-Pierre Dozon writes, a proposCote d’Ivoire, the logic of many rural land transactions ‘‘is not‘I sell because I own,’ but ‘I sell, therefore I own’” (Dozon,1985, p. 276; Lund, 2002).

Whether or not assets are individually owned, decisionsabout investment and the disposition of property are shapedby social relations and concerns. In an evocative account of‘‘Growing old and building a house” in the southern Ghanaiantown of Kwahu-Tafo, Sjaak van der Geest describes the senseof security and emotional satisfaction voiced by elderly men 13

who have succeeded in building one house or more houses—and the corresponding sadness and social isolation of thosewho have not. ‘‘The fact that you have given your relativesor children a place to sleep is an honour to the person whoput up a house,” one man explained (van der Geest, 1998,p. 343), while another added that ‘‘when you build a house,the whole world will see what you have left, and your name willnever die” (van der Geest, 1998, p. 335). Most of his informantsagreed, however, that their first priority was to educate theirchildren. Education, they explained, is a necessary conditionfor success in today’s economic world, and successful andgrateful children are more important for security and comfortin old age than being able to retire in one’s own house. Discuss-ing elderly neighbor, people explained that he was spending hisold age alone and in poverty, not because he had nevermanaged to build a house, but because he had failed to doenough for his children (van der Geest, 1998, p. 356).

If education is the first priority, leaving property for one’schildren to inherit remains an important goal. Like houses,teak farms are seen, at least in part, as an investment in the fu-ture of the owner’s children. Discussing his recently plantedplot of teak, one man commented that ‘‘I may not live tosee the benefit,” but that the investment was worthwhile be-cause his children might. While informants rarely expressedconcerns about the security of their own claims to their housesor tree farms, several had taken steps to protect their childrenagainst future dispossession. Under Asante’s historicallymatrilineal system of descent, assets such as houses and treefarms become the property of the matrilineal relatives ratherthan of the surviving spouse(s) and children of the deceased.Anyone may write a will specifying differently and, since1986, the law states that if a person dies intestate, two-thirdof his (or her) self-acquired property belongs to the survivingspouse and children. The claims of matrikin continue to berecognized, however, in practice and often in the courts (Ber-ry, 2001, pp. 112–114). In A____, several people whom I re-interviewed in 2002 had built a second house ‘‘for the chil-dren,” and a grower who planted his first teak farm on a por-tion of his family’s land, had started a second on land that heacquired for himself, so ‘‘the family won’t think I am usingtheir land for my children.”

As these examples suggest, asset formation draws on and al-ters family dynamics in complex ways. In a richly detailed his-torical study of Asante women under colonial rule, Allmanand Tashjian argue that the spread of ‘‘cocoa capitalism”transformed the way Asantes practiced and understood mar-riage, parenthood, and kinship. Tension over husbands’ de-mands that wives and children work on their cocoa farms,together with women’s increasing access to independent in-come from trade and corresponding efforts to exercise moreauthority within and beyond their immediate families, pro-duced a crisis in gender relations that spilled over into colonialcourts and local politics by the 1920s. Over time, Allman and


Tashjian suggest, this process altered the meaning of father-hood from a nurturing role to one of ‘‘ownership,” in whichmen placed less emphasis on providing for their wives andchildren and more on asserting claims to their labor ‘‘by rightof blood” in the case of children, and marriage payments totheir wives’ relatives (Allman & Tashjian, 2000, pp. 102–104).

More recently, several studies have argued that declining re-turns to cocoa production and the general economic malaisethat affected Ghana from the late 1960s through the end ofthe century priced marriage out of the market for many youngpeople, limiting their ability to assume the full responsibilitiesof self-supporting adults able to earn respect by providing fortheir children and aging parents, and increasing the burdenson older women to continue in this role (Clark, 1999, 78ff).Clark cautions, however, against reading these strains as evi-dence of a general weakening of family ties. ‘‘Asante value kin-ship because it does not completely specify what they can callon kin for” (Clark, 1999, p. 81) she explains, adding that bothrising economic inequality and prolonged hardship are under-mining many people’s ability to contribute to family resourcesand increasing their dependence on family support. The shapeof such dilemmas and options for addressing them reflects notonly the unevenness of economic opportunities and resourcesin Ghana, but also Ghana’s changing position in the globaleconomy and differences in individual Ghanaians’ experienceswithin it.

5. DELOCALIZATION

Ghanaians have traveled abroad, seeking employment andopportunity, for centuries but, until recently, most voluntaryemigrants remained within the region, drawn to neighboringcountries, such as Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire, when their econ-omies were booming and Ghana’s was not. 14 By the 1980s,however, most West African economies were in difficultyand Ghanaians began to look further afield, to Europe, NorthAmerica, and parts of Asia and the Middle East. In 1994,20,000 Ghanaians were reported to be living in Toronto;65,572 were listed as living in the US in 2000 (Peil, 1995, p.349; US, 2000). During 1995–2000, over 10,000 Ghanaiansare estimated to have emigrated annually to Europe andNorth America. 15

As the numbers of expatriate Ghanaians increased, so toodid the volume of remittances sent back to Ghana each year.Movements of money are even harder to trace than movementsof people, but most sources agree that remittances from over-seas have grown, both absolutely and relatively to internationaltransfers within the region, since 1995. In 2003, the IMF re-ported that Ghana received $32 million in private remittances;the Central Bank of Ghana gave a much higher figure of $400million (Anarfi & Kwankye, 2003, p. 25). In 2004, remittancessurpassed cocoa as a source of foreign exchange earnings, andwere becoming increasingly significant as a source of invest-ment in small businesses, houses, and farms (IMF, 2005b,pp. 29,31; Schoorl, 2000, p. 15; Ammassari, 2004a).

If the rising use of remittances to fund small-scale invest-ments reflects a new level of Ghanaian participation in the glo-bal economy, it has also contributed to changes in thedistribution of income and wealth, both nationally and locally,within the country. 16 Throughout West Africa, most remit-tances are used to supplement consumption expenditures byemigrants’ relatives at home, giving rise to a modest redistri-bution of income from rich countries to poor ones (Sander& Maimbo, 2003, p. 17; Taylor, et al., 1996). Evidence frommy case studies suggests that they may also contribute togrowing inequality within Ghana—bringing global inequali-

ties ‘‘home” to Ghanaian communities, families, and house-holds in very concrete and visible ways, as the followingexamples illustrate. 17

(a) Translocal families

Slightly more than one-third of the houses I visited in A____had been built by people who lived elsewhere, the majorityoutside the country, and had sent money from their placesof residence and employment to put up one building or morebuildings in A____. Their stories support the argument thatremittances work, to some extent, to spread income withinfamilies, subsidizing living expenses for emigrants’ relativesat home. They also illustrate the degree to which migration in-creases intrafamilial differences in income and wealth, andemigrants’ investments bring global inequalities ‘‘home” tosuburban neighborhoods and households in Ghana.

These examples and others I collected in A____ and twoother Asante towns where I carried out fieldwork in 1993and 2002 illustrate the social complexity of expanding subur-ban neighborhoods in Kumasi and other Ghanaian cities.My evidence is consistent with scholarly studies and popularperceptions that chiefs have made a lot of money selling landfor building or commercial ventures, and that small farmshave been displaced in the process (Amanor, 2001; Berry,2001; Ubink, 2004). Rather than simply pushing poverty intothe countryside, however, suburban growth appears also to beincorporating and reproducing national and global patterns ofinequality within local communities and even households.Built with the earnings of Ghanaians who have prospered inbusiness, real estate, professional employment, or even rela-tively unskilled jobs in high wage countries, many suburbanvillas provide housing for their poorer relatives and/or rentalaccommodations for Ghanaians with modest waged or sala-ried jobs at home, some of whom are saving to build housesof their own.

The contrasting fortunes of siblings and neighbors were sub-jects of daily conversation in A____, along with changes in thesocial demography of the town which residents routinelyattributed to ‘‘development.” Newer houses were typically lar-ger and better equipped than those built before 1993, suggest-ing that the newcomers were better off, on average, than long-term residents of the town. Some long-term residents had alsobuilt new or expanded houses and, in several cases, put up asecond or third building in addition to their principal resi-dence. In addition to those who had built a second house‘‘for the children” or to rent out, several of my informantshad put up a store or communication center, selling provi-sions, building materials, pharmaceuticals, or services suchas tailoring, hairstyling, and telephone calls, to the growingpopulation of the town. In most cases, these shops were staffedby one of the owner’s children or relatives, who would other-wise have been unemployed. Like houses occupied rent-free byrelatives of the absent owner(s), these shops are sites of intra-familial subsidies that illustrate the growing divide betweenthose who benefit from global inequalities and those who de-pend on the generosity of their more fortunate kin.

(b) Transforming the social landscape: communitiesreconfigured

The domestication of global inequalities is not only a familymatter. Altogether, I gathered information on 75 buildings inA____, including 60 houses, eight shops, and the chief’s newpalace—an imposing two-storied structure that was not yetcompleted at the time. Of the 33 houses belonging to people


who were born in A____ and considered it their home town,14 were occupied by the original owners, 11 belonged todescendants of the original owner(s) and eight others had beenbuilt during the last 10 years by life-long residents of thetown. 18 The remaining 27 houses were built by ‘‘strangers.”Six of these people had lived in the town for 10 years or more,and were considered established members of the community;the rest were newcomers, several of whom were not residingin A____ at the time of my study.

Differences between long-term residents and newcomerswere very much on people’s minds. In a small but striking dis-cursive shift, residents were using colonial era terminology in2002, referring to long-term residents as ‘‘natives” (rather thanas ‘‘citizens” as had been common in 1993) as distinct fromnewcomers or ‘‘strangers” (Berry, 2001, pp. 130, 150–155;De Witte, 2001, pp. 82,83). 19 How these terms mapped ontopeople’s everyday lives was not always easy to discern. Severalnewcomers volunteered that they liked living in A____ because‘‘the town is peaceful,” implying that other places were not.Long-term residents also expressed cautious approbation forthe changes taking place in their town. ‘‘The strangers arenot troublesome,” I was told, and several people added that‘‘development” was making the town more ‘‘lively.” ‘‘We usedto sleep at 8 o’clock,” one man explained, but now peoplesocialize until 11 or 12 o’clock. Well aware that relations inthe town could turn sour, if ‘‘natives” began to feel that out-siders were benefiting at their expense, the chief had recentlyset aside a number of building plots for ‘‘natives.” Smallerand cheaper than the standard-sized building lots he had soldto ‘‘strangers,” these plots were evidently intended to demon-strate the chief’s benevolent concern for ‘‘his people,” whilereminding citizens and strangers alike of his continuingauthority over all land in the ‘‘traditional area” attached tohis chiefly office or ‘‘stool.” Located on still undeveloped fieldsthat stood adjacent to the chief’s new palace, the new layout ofaffordable plots provided a very public example of the progres-sive use of ‘‘traditional authority” that a number of seniorAsante chiefs have been at pains to cultivate under the bannerof Ghana’s Fourth Republic.

6. EQUITY FOR THE CHIEF?

Even before the era of market liberalization, Asante commu-nities were not egalitarian. Incorporated into the lower eche-lons of the state under the colonial system of indirect rule,chieftaincy reinvented itself after independence in Ghana, bydefault as much as by design. Under its first President, KwameNkrumah, the state dismantled the system of ‘‘Native Admin-istration” left behind by the departing colonial regime, strip-ping chiefs of the administrative, legislative, and judicialauthority assigned to them under colonial rule, confiscatingthe lands of those who had opposed the ruling party’s rise topower, and sending some of them to jail (Rathbone, 2000).New legislation expanded the state’s power to acquire landfor public use and set limits on the amount of rent chiefs couldcollect from ‘‘strangers,” but stopped short of abrogating theirauthority over land itself. Facing weaker and less antagonisticregimes after Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966, chiefs began tolobby informally for a greater role in public life, taking theopportunity to advocate placing limits on the state’s powerto acquire land for unspecified ‘‘public interests” (Arhin,2001). In 1979, Ghana’s third Constitution not only reaffirmedchiefs’ ‘‘traditional” authority over stool lands, but extendedthis principle to the northern regions where land had effectivelybeen owned by the state since the early years of colonial rule.

Under pressure from foreign donors as well as from domes-tic parties interested in gaining access to state-held assets, thegovernment began to sell off state enterprises and to pay com-pensation, when required by the courts, to former ownerswhose lands had been improperly acquired by the state afterindependence. Since coming to power at the end of 2000, theKufuor regime has taken the process a step further, promisingto return ‘‘to the original owners” lands acquired by the statebut never used for a specific public purpose. In addition toconflicts over competing claims to ‘‘original ownership”—many of them brought forth in response to the prospect of res-titution—these initiatives have opened the door to an ex-panded role for ‘‘traditional authorities” in Ghanaian publiclife. Full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of thepresent paper, but the following examples from my case stud-ies point to some possible directions of future change.

Combined with donor-backed initiatives to decentralizegoverning institutions and practices, the push to privatizeownership in Ghana has increased the political as well as eco-nomic incentives for chiefs to take a more active role in ‘‘devel-opment,” both within and beyond their respective ‘‘traditionalareas.” 20 Since colonial times, chiefs have faced pressure fromthe state and protests from local citizens urging them to treatthe revenues they collect as ‘‘tribute” from stranger farmers,timber contractors, and mining companies, as public revenues,to be used for the benefit of ‘‘the community” rather than forthe chief’s personal expenditures. In the past, chiefs have re-sisted these pressures with considerable success, and there isas yet no effective legal mechanism in place to prevent thisfrom happening in the future (see, inter alia, Rathbone,1993, 2000; Amanor, 1999; Berry, 2001). At the same time,chiefs in the communities I have studied have shown them-selves to be keenly aware of the political advantages of build-ing a reputation for ‘‘progressive” leadership, and some haveworked proactively to show results—lobbying the state andNGOs for paved roads, piped water, electricity, or schools,courting potential investors, urging local residents to perform‘‘communal labor,” and making occasional, well-publicizedcontributions to community projects or gestures such as thechief’s decision to earmark a number of subsidized buildingplots for local residents in A____.

In some cases, chiefs have also responded directly to interna-tionally backed efforts to privatize state assets and services orrecruit foreign investors. In one case, the chiefs of an oldAsante polity successfully acquired a state-owned oil palmplantation located in their ‘‘traditional area” for a price thatwas 30% below the assessed market value, on the grounds thatthe stool’s ownership of the land was tantamount to partialownership of the plantation. Another chief made a similarargument in negotiations with a foreign company that wasconsidering locating a small factory in the chief’s traditionalarea. In both cases, the chiefs were not seeking to purchasecommercial property with their personal resources, but wereclaiming that traditional prerogatives of their office entitledthem to part ownership of any commercial enterprise locatedon their stool lands.

These incidents, insignificant in themselves, point nonethe-less to some of the ways in which market liberalization initia-tives are complicating economic and political practice inGhana. Neither private individuals nor elected representativesof their ancestral communities, chiefs occupy an ambiguousposition in Ghanaian political life which allows them to makeclaims on behalf of their communities without having to ac-count to community members for the ways in which theyuse resources they acquire as a result. In the case of the formerstate-owned plantation cited above, should the traditional


council prove able to operate the farm at a profit, they mightfind it politically expedient to use part of the proceeds for thebenefit of the community, but they would be under no legalobligation to do so.

More generally, I would argue, by opening a door for peopleto claim state land on the grounds of ‘‘original ownership,”privatization risks promoting politics of indigeneity in Ghanareminiscent of those that have proved explosive in Nigeria andCote d’Ivoire. The anecdotes related above are not isolatedexamples. Struggles over land and chieftaincy have intensifiedin recent years, notably in northern Ghana where returns ofstate-held lands to their original owners have given rise to legaldisputes and, sometimes, to violent conflicts over land claimsand jurisdiction among chiefs, citizens, and the custodians ofearth shrines (Lentz, 2001; Lund, 2003), and among ruraldwellers in the south who, lacking any prospects for employ-ment outside the village, try to protect their own access tofarmland by driving away ‘‘strangers” even if the latter havelived in the same community for two or three generations(Boni, 2006; compare Amanor, 2001). Far from providing sta-ble links to the past, community membership and rights toland are subject to on-going contestations, in which contes-tants are rarely evenly matched.

7. CONCLUSION

Communities are changing rapidly in Ghana, as cities grow,economic opportunities expand for some and persistently eludemany others, and the country continues its multi-faceted exper-iments with democratic governance and political-administra-tive decentralization. As illustrated by the cases discussedabove, periurban villages are rapidly transforming into subur-

ban neighborhoods where long-established residents dwell sideby side with an increasingly varied population of newcomers,most people live on incomes earned elsewhere, and globalinequalities of wealth and privilege are reproduced in the dwell-ings and lifestyles of the inhabitants and their relations withemigrant kin and former neighbors. Similar processes were atwork in the rural communities where my urban dwelling infor-mants had established their teak farms. Resident villagers actedas dependent intermediaries for absent farm owners, supervis-ing farm work carried out by casual hired labor, in exchangefor occasional handouts when the owner found time to visitor arranged to send money from abroad.

Destabilized rather than uniformly marginalized by theiruneven engagement with urban and international economies,Ghanaian communities are also caught up in multi-facetedcontests over authority and influence inspired, in part, bythe politics of decentralization and Ghanaians’ continuingquest for access to land. In such circumstances, neoliberals’insistence on registering rights of ownership, privatizing assetsand services, and empowering ‘‘local” agents vis-a-vis the statehas intensified contestation over local governance and com-munity boundaries—who belongs, on what terms, and whodecides? To the extent that these contests have obscured ratherthan clarified lines of public versus private ownership andaccountability, or contributed to a resurgence of traditionalauthority as a political force, they emphasize the importanceof looking closely at changes within communities and statesas well as at relations between them, before drawing conclu-sions about prospects for either state- or community-led landreform. If community-led land reform means ratifying theownership rights of ‘‘natives” and traditional authorities whileexcluding all others, the results are not likely to be either dem-ocratic or sustainable.

NOTES

1. Previous publications include Berry (1997), Berry (2001, 2002).

2. These trends have been documented in Ghana, and also in other WestAfrican countries (Bierschenk, Olivier de Sardan, & Chauveau, 2000;Thomi, Yankson, & Zanu, 2000; Fay et al., 2005).

3. Specific arrangements vary among different localities and regions,but since 1979, ‘‘customary” land claims have been recognizedthroughout Ghana. See Kasanga, 2000; Lund, 2008; Woodman, 1996,among others.

4. Cocoa and other tree crops dominated Ghana’s merchandise exportsfrom the late 19th century through the 1980s, and still account for asignificant proportion of export earnings. Ghanaian cocoa farmers’investments in housing are documented in Brokensha, 1966 and Hill,1963, among others.

5. The rich literature on social and economic history of cocoa growing inGhana includes Allman & Tashjian, 2000; Arhin, 1986; Austin, 2005; Hill,1963; Okali, 1983.

6. With over 700 members and close working relations with local staff ofthe Forestry Commission, ARTGA was the largest and most active groupof its kind in Ghana at the time of my inquiries.

7. State funding for low cost housing construction—never abundant—declined sharply in the 1970s, as cocoa yields peaked, foreign exchangeearnings declined, and other ‘‘formal” sectors of the economy followedsuit. By the mid-1970s, the limited amount of funding available was being

channeled into higher priced dwellings, as a source of revenue rather thanas assistance for the poor, and housing subsidies ceased altogether after1984, under the rules of structural adjustment. Asibuo, 1994, p. 12;Konadu-Agyemang, 1994.

8. Created in the 1970s to mobilize private savings for investment inagriculture, Rural Banks lend primarily to teachers and civil servants,whose salaries are paid directly into accounts at the banks, rather than tofarmers or other self-employed persons who are considered more likely todefault (Aryeetey & Nissanke, 1998; Berry, 1997, pp. 1231,1231).

9. In 2004, remittances surpassed sales of cocoa as a source of foreignexchange (IMF, 2005).

10. The sister, whom I had interviewed in 1993, was visiting her children‘‘in Europe,” so I was not able to re-interview her directly. In this case, asin several others where I was unable to interview the absentee owner, myinformation comes from conversations with current occupants of thehouse and/or with neighbors who knew the owner.

11. Teak may be harvested after 10–12 years for utility poles or somebuilding purposes, but fully grown timber, which is far more valuable,takes 20–25 years to mature.

12. One of the teak farms I visited was managed by an elderly couple onbehalf of their son, who lived in New Jersey and sent periodic remittancesto his parents to cover farm expenses.


13. In Kwahu-Tafo, few women were wealthy enough to have builthouses, but many have done so in other Ghanaian towns (Van der Geest,1998, p. 349).

14. West Africa as a whole has a long history of intensive intraregionalmigration. In 2002, West Africa was home to 42% of all transnationalmigrants on the continent, and migrants within the region far outnum-bered the growing exodus to Europe and North America. See, inter alia,Ammassari, 2004b, p. 10; Cordell, Gregory & Piche (Eds.), 1996; WestAfrican Long-Term Perspective Study, 1998; Van Hear, 1998; Sander &Maimbo, 2003.

15. Black, 2004, p. 20. These figures probably understate the actualnumbers. Most West African governments do not keep systematic recordsof people who leave their countries, and official records of West Africanarrivals in Europe and North America cover only those who arrive withlegal documents. Most sources agree that official figures are too low, butthere is no consensus on the margins of error involved (Ammassari, 2004b,p. 21).

16. Although poverty levels declined during the 1990s, 40% of Ghanaianhouseholds remained below the official poverty line of $250 per capita ofannual consumption expenditure, and 27% were living in ‘‘extremepoverty” at $190 per year, less than half the national average of $412(IMF, 2003. pp. 13,14).

17. Numerous studies attest to the importance Ghanaians place oninvestment in houses as a mark of personal and social success as well as asource of accommodation. See, inter alia, Anarfi & Kwankye, 2003, p. 27;Black, King, & Tiemoko, 2003, p. 12; Kabki, Mazzucato, & Ernest, 2004,87ff; Peil, 1995, pp. 361, 362; Stucki, 1995, pp. 119, 134; Tiemoko, 2004, p.162; van der Geest, 1998, passim.

18. Of the 70 houses for which I obtained information, nine were second(or, in one case, third) houses built by long-term residents who hadevidently prospered in the years since my initial study.

19. Boundaries between ‘‘citizens” and ‘‘strangers” have changed,sometimes radically, over time, in response to changing local pressureson resources and opportunities, or relations of authority within andbeyond the locality in question. For recent examples from the richscholarly literature on this subject, see Boni, 2005, Lentz & Nugent, 2000,and McCaskie, 2000.

20. A common expression rather than a legal category, ‘‘traditional area”

has both territorial and social connotations, referring interchangeably tothe territory or the ‘‘citizenry” of a traditional polity. How these categoriesare to be constructed in any particular context is a matter of local practice,subject to on-going debate and frequent contestation, depending on theway they are invoked in relation to land or chieftaincy disputes.

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