Chiefs in the City: Traditional Authority in the Modern State

Abstract

While forms of authority that descend from social or cultural tradition are commonly understood as archaic, traditional authorities often survive and occasionally even thrive during the formation of modern states. Chieftaincies do not only endure in the Ghanaian countryside but also proliferate in new neighbourhoods on the peripheries of Ghana’s fast-growing cities. We develop an explanation for the endurance of traditional authorities, based on extensive fieldwork in one recently developed neighbourhood in a previously uninhabited part of Greater Accra, where we conducted interviews and analysed documents from the archives of the chief’s Divisional Council. We show that the formation of a modern state has restricted the chiefs’ discretion as sovereigns but afforded them greater power as managers of the land and gatekeepers of the state bureaucracy. Traditional authority is not overwritten but rather refined, transformed and stabilized in the process of state formation.