ABSTRACT

While ancestor shrines mark a proper house among the Dagara and other groups in northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, the earth shrine signifies a proper village. New settlements are founded through expansion across the landscape and claims of ‘who came first’ on a particular patch of land become bound up with the creation and jurisdiction of new earth shrines. This paper seeks to explore the dynamics of migration and movement, focusing on the creation of earth shrines, of Dagara-speaking groups in the Black Volta region of West Africa into already thinly settled areas inhabited mainly by Sisala and Phuo-speaking groups.

Keywords: earth shrines, Dagara, Sisala, Ghana, Burkina Faso, frontiers, Black Volta, migration, ritual authority.

INTRODUCTION

Claiming to be the first-comers in an area is the most widespread strategy to legitimate authority in Africa, as Igor Kopytoff (1987) has argued in his seminal article on the internal African frontier. In the West African savannah, and in much of Africa, claims of being the first-comers on a particular piece of land are also intimately intertwined with questions of land rights and ownership. First-comers, be they individuals or, more commonly, groups of frontiersmen, are believed to have established a special relationship with the spirits of the land and thus played a crucial role in ‘opening up’ the wild bush or forest for human settlement and agriculture. In many places, first-comers established shrines at which regular sacrifices are offered to the earth god in order to ensure the fertility of the land and the well-being of the community (Eyre-Smith 1933; Goody 1957; Zwernemann 1968). The office of the earth priest, the custodian of the shrine, is usually vested in the lineage of the first-comers, at least according to widespread norms, and even where the office was appropriated by a powerful group of late-comers, these late-comers often still present their claims in the idiom of first-comership by re-interpreting the settlement history. First-comers and their descendants distributed land to later immigrants, granted, and still grant, the right to build houses and bury the dead, and often mediate in conflicts over land boundaries and land use. In many areas, first-comer lineages are considered to be the allodial owners of the land, even though it may be highly controversial what this entails in practical terms when, in the course of time, all village lands have been assigned to late-coming families (Kuba et al. 2004; Lund 2006).

If first-comers are believed to be the founders of earth shrines, the reverse is also true: control over an earth shrine supports claims to being first-comers and to allodial property rights. As a consequence, the shrines’ origins, trajectories, and jurisdiction were, and continue to be, often subject to intense debate. In this article, I want to explore the dynamics of the historical settlement frontier in the Black Volta region, focusing on the creation of earth shrines.

During the past two hundred years or even longer, the area of what is today north-western Ghana and south-western Burkina Faso has been the site of an impressive agricultural expansion of Dagara-speaking groups.¹ They moved into unpopulated bush, but more often into already thinly settled areas, inhabited mainly by Sisala and Phuo-speaking groups, as well as Dyan, Bwaba, and Lobi. Unlike the frontiersmen from expansionist centralized polities, the Dagara pioneers were not interested in establishing political control over the previous inhabitants of their new territories, but in gaining control over the land, materially and ritually. Following a first phase of relatively peaceful cohabitation, this aim often involved the displacement of the previous inhabitants. In some cases, the latter were driven away violently, under the threat of being killed; in other cases, they opted to move away ‘voluntarily.’ In any case, the Dagara’s quest for land was more successful than the claims of these earlier inhabitants, at least until the early years of the twentieth century. But even where violence towards previous inhabitants or competing immigrants helped to establish a new settlement, if it was to prosper and attract further settlers, it needed spiritual protection, through peaceful communication with the earth god and the spirits of the bush, and a stable social and ritual order that defined, among other things, the rights of access to and control over the natural resources. In other words, the new settlement needed an earth shrine – either a shrine of its own or close ties to an already existing one.

In what follows, I will compare Sisala and Dagara conceptions of earth shrines and analyze the ways in which the Dagara frontiersmen created shrines or acquired them from the Sisala. These observations are part of a larger research project on the settlement history, the appropriation of land, and the dynamics of ethnic relations in the Black Volta region, in which I have been involved since 1996.² Because written sources predating the arrival of the French and the British in 1897 are entirely absent, oral traditions were our most important sources in reconstructing the regional history. Over the years, our team of researchers collected over five hundred stories of ‘migration-and-settlement,’ including narratives about the construction of earth shrines, in more than 150 villages, covering settlements of all relevant ‘ethnic’ groups in an area of about 3,500 square kilometres. The interpretation of these oral traditions, however, involved thorny methodological questions. For one, these traditions rarely go back further than four or five generations. Furthermore, in this area there are no indigenous professional historians, like the griots, and no official village histories, so that we were confronted with numerous and contradictory accounts related by different patrilineages. Finally and most importantly, these competing traditions play an important role in supporting claims to land and positions of authority and so can obviously not be taken at face value. In order to understand the micro-politics of oral traditions, therefore, we complemented the survey-type interviews in a large number of villages with in-depth case studies in selected localities and compared the ‘winner’s’ and ‘loser’s’ versions of accounts relating struggles over land rights. Furthermore, we looked for non-narrative sources that may confirm or contradict the narrative material. Such sources were trees, and more specifically the composition of agricultural ‘parks,’ which help to establish relative chronologies of settlement (Lentz and Sturm 2001); village names, which give indications of how a settlement was founded; the spatial distribution of lineage segments, which reveals migration patterns; and, finally, currently existing ritual hierarchies, which often reflect sedimented settlement history. Much of this ‘non-narrative’ material was accessible because I have been doing fieldwork in the area for more almost twenty years and gained insight through many informal conversations, walking with people through their fields or travelling to neighbouring villages, acquiring a building lot and constructing a house of my own in one of the villages, and assisting at sacrifices at ancestor shrines and earth shrines.

STRATEGIES OF EXPANSION: RITUAL PROTECTION ON THE FRONTIER³

Just as ancestor shrines mark a proper house, the earth shrine signifies a proper village. The underlying concept of earth shrines shows some similarities among all societies in the Black Volta region. All land is believed to be under the ritual protection of an earth god with whom first-comers concluded a kind of ‘pact’ (Dacher 1997; Goody 1957; Kuba et al. 2004; Liberski-Bagnoud 2002; Savonnet 1976; Tengan 1991; Zwernemann 1968). The territory under the protection of a particular earth shrine is called tengan (literally the ‘crust’ or ‘skin of the earth’) in Dagara and tebuo in Sisale. It includes the settlement as well as different categories of uninhabited bush. During the early phases of settlement in the region, when land was not scarce, the earth-shrine ‘parish,’ to use Goody’s (1956) term, was probably understood, not as a flat homogenous territory with separating linear boundaries, but as a field of ritual power, with a well-defined centre (the earth shrine) in the inhabited and regularly cultivated space, and with concentric circles of influence that thinned out towards the uncultivated bush. However, when more and more bush was being cultivated, the boundaries between neighbouring earth-shrine parishes had to be defined more precisely, often in a conflict-ridden process. The custodians of the earth shrine were generally not regarded as the ‘owners’ of the natural resources in a strictly economic sense. But because of their privileged access to the earth gods, they were the only frontiersmen capable of ritually transforming ‘virgin’ bush into exploitable resources and surveying the proper order of all earth-related matters (Jacob 2002; 2003), and it is from these indispensable tasks that they derived, and continue to derive, their income (ritual gifts from co-villagers and further immigrants) and special rights to control all hunting, fishing, and gathering activities.

While the Dagara, the Sisala, and most of their neighbours share these basic concepts, each group has developed its own ideas about the installation and handling of an earth shrine and about who should be its custodian. Among the Dagara, the earth shrine itself usually consists of a stone (tengan kuur) and a tree (tengan tie) under which the stone is buried and where sacrifices are carried out. As mentioned above, the custodian of the shrine, the tengansob (the ‘owner’ or ‘master’ of the shrine), supposedly a descendant of the first settler, is responsible for sacrifices to the earth, allocates land to new settlers, plays an important role in the ritual opening of new houses, and opens the annual fishing and hunting parties. In cases of suicide or other ‘unnatural’ deaths, the tengansob must intervene to repair the damage done to the earth before the corpse can be buried. The apparent power of the earth-priestly office is restricted by numerous taboos. Although the earth priest benefits from the sacrificial meat and beer and is entitled to lost property and stray domestic animals, the office is generally regarded as dangerous and unrewarding. However, while individuals may be reluctant to become a tengansob, the patriclan segment within which the office hereditarily circulates will strongly affirm its right to chose the earth priest from its ranks.

The stone at the centre of the Dagara earth shrine is a surprisingly mobile object; it may be carried in a bag from one location to another. An earth shrine is believed to transfer its powers to any stone lying on the ground surrounding the tengan. This is how the ‘mother’ shrine can produce ‘children’ (kubile, ‘small stones’), which may be carried away, by members of the earth-priestly lineage, to be installed elsewhere. All Dagara-Wiile tengan kube found in the area of Dano, for instance, are believed to come from the original home, located in what is now Ghana. For the Dagara-Lobr, however, there is a taboo against carrying a tengan kuur across the Black Volta, and, although performing sacrifices at the ford can circumvent the taboo, earth shrines with origins that can be traced to the other side of the river are rare.

If a new Dagara settlement is founded on land under the protection of an existing Dagara earth shrine with the consent and help of the shrine’s custodian, the ritual dependence of the younger settlement is usually not disputed. Communal sacrifices at the beginning and the end of the farming season were first performed at the older earth shrine, but eventually an elder of the new settlement would be given permission to carry out most of the sacrifices on behalf of the new neighbourhood and to ritually ‘open’ new houses and supervise the burial of the dead. This could lead to the establishment of an independent earth shrine, whose custodians, in some cases, even denied its past affiliation with the ‘mother’ shrine. In a number of cases, however, the founding lineages of new settlements refused to ask the neighbouring village for a kubile, turning instead to a more distant settlement where a closely related segment of their patriclan held the office of the tengansob. On the whole, whatever relationship governs the allegiance between the junior and the senior shrines, be it kinship or territorial ties, an asymmetrical relationship between shrines can be observed in ritual practice. The ritual dependence of a new settlement usually lasts for several generations, but in most cases the new village will strive to gain more autonomy. This is usually a lengthy and tedious process that is generally not well received by the original village. Independence means that serious offences against the earth, even suicide, can be made good through sacrifice at the new village’s tengan without having to refer to the ‘mother’ shrine.

Networks and hierarchies between several earth shrines and processes of ‘fission’ of ritual parishes are much more important among the Dagara than among their neighbours. As I will discuss in more detail in the next section, the Sisala appear to have no concept of ritual dependence between earth shrines, even though alliances between neighbouring villages are in some cases reflected by the identical names that their earth shrines bear. Sisala earth shrines are said to have been founded on the spot or with stones that frontiersmen are claimed to have brought with them, but in no case having been received from earlier inhabitants. For the Phuo, a group closely related to the Sisala, on the other hand, it is completely unthinkable that earth-shrine stones are carried along; in their eyes, earth shrines cannot be moved.

Comparing Sisala and Dagara earth-shrine policies, one is left with the strong impression that the Dagara have adopted a somewhat simplified ritual system that allows for more flexibility and, most importantly, more mobility than the systems of their neighbours. The Dagara have few taboos on the admissible origins of the shrine stone and few restrictions concerning the recruitment of the custodians of the shrine. Moreover, the pattern of ‘fission’ of shrine parishes and of establishing ‘daughter shrines’ transforms the territorial cult into a surprisingly mobile institution. In addition to the strategic advantages of the patriclan system, this was another factor that supported the territorial expansion of the Dagara.

SISAL A EARTH SHRINES AND SHRINE ALLIANCES

Among the Sisala, we encounter an explicit ideology of local stability, cohesion of the ‘big house,’ and longstanding occupation of one place. The separation of an agnatic kin group from its original home is usually explained in terms of traumatic conflict, and in most cases links with the former settlement are severed. Many of my Sisala interlocutors insisted that still today they could not return to, nor even visit, their ancestors’ original village, lest they be afflicted with illness and misfortune or even death. Some Sisala narratives refer to conflicts between brothers as the reason for migration, for instance a struggle over perceived unequal distribution of the spoils of a joint hunting expedition (or one undertaken secretly by one brother alone).⁴ Other narratives invoke the ‘pregnant-woman-slit-open’ motif, i.e., a dispute about the sex of an unborn child, which resulted in the death of the woman (and the embryo) because one party ‘operated’ her (and subsequently had to migrate) in order to determine who was right.⁵ Significantly, and in keeping with their different ethos of mobility, Dagara narratives never resort to these motifs in order to explain migration.⁶ Migration-and-settlement stories of Sisala villages, which were established not until the second half of the nineteenth century, explain that the founders of the village fled from the incursions of Muslim warlords or the aggression of neighbouring Dagara settlements, but usually combine such historical ‘realism’ with the conventional, more metaphorical motifs of the conflict between greedy brothers or the ‘pregnant-woman-slit-open’ story.⁷

While the Dagara have continued to found new farmsteads and village wards on the settlement frontier up to the present day, Sisala present their migration as an affair of the past: they became mobile, not of their own choice, but because circumstances beyond their control – including conflicts among close kin – forced them to move. Neither the ideal of autonomy nor the ethos of ‘go forth young man’ is as prominent among the Sisala as among the Dagara. On the contrary, a Sisala who, for whatever reason, decides to leave his original house, will do his best to ‘hide’ this movement and seek to attach himself as a ‘sister’s son’ (a tolbie) to one of the houses in the new settlement, no matter whether he is actually related to this family or not. He will shift his allegiance to the adopted village and even refuse to visit his original house that, in turn, will deny any relationship with the migrant.⁸

One of the oldest Sisala villages in the western parts of ‘Sisalaland’ is Bangwon, near the Burkina Faso–Ghana border. Leke Siino, a renowned, old diviner and in charge of earth-shrine matters until the new earth priest would be officially installed, insisted that Bangwon’s founder did not immigrate from anywhere, but ‘came down from God.’

Our ancestor Bangwon never came from any village.⁹ ... From God (wiise) he came down and settled here.... As for the name ‘Bangwon,’ it refers to this beam he and the brother shouldered.... The brother’s name was Jaffien. He (Jaffien) went and saw an anthill and dug and opened it [i.e., settled]. Our ancestor went and saw the senior brother (Jaffien) and said: “You came and you were able to put up houses and I still have nothing.” So Jaffien said he would come and build for him ... and they went to the bush for a beam. They went, collected and shouldered it. The junior brother complained that his neck was about cutting off. The senior brother said he should throw it down. From there our ancestor vowed that his neck (benye) will never carry a log again – bengmwor. That is how Bangwon got its name. The house put up by the senior brother was red (bi fien), hence the name Jaffien.¹⁰

Direct descent from the supreme God (wiise) is an unusual motif in Sisala narratives, which Leke obviously employed in order to emphasize the seniority of Bangwon. In other parts of his account, he resorted to more common images of migration, relating, for instance, how Bangwon and Jaffien ‘walked together.’ Leke explained that Jaffien and his people originally settled around the current village of Kolinka but were later driven away by the ‘Malians’ – probably a reference to slave raiders such as the Karantaos and the Zaberma – as well as the expansionist Dagara, and sought refuge in Bangwon. Whether Jaffien left his original earth shrine behind or took it along and installed it next to Bangwon’s shrine was not quite clear, but Leke left no doubt that Jaffien’s land was ‘added’ to the Bangwon territory. In any case, when Jaffien died without leaving male descendants, Bangwon inherited this land. Other informants believed that Bangwon was Jaffien’s nephew (tolbie) rather than his junior brother, and speculated that Jaffien may have been a Phuo, not a Sisala. Possibly, a group of Phuo were already established in the Ouessa-Kolinka area when Bangwon’s group arrived, and the latter eventually married Phuo women.¹¹

Be that as it may, all informants agreed that Jaffien and Bangwon belonged to the first Sisala (or Phuo) villages established in the area. If we accept Leke’s claim that Bangwon was the grandfather of Bakyolo who, according to early colonial reports, was installed as earth priest in the 1880s and was probably born before 1830, then Bangwon may have been founded around the mid-eighteenth century or even earlier.¹² Two further villages asserted to belong to this first wave of Sisala immigration: Piina, some fifteen kilometres south-east of Bangwon, and Bo, originally established on land later occupied by the Dagara of Tantuo. Informants in these villages reported that Jaffien, Bangwon, and their own ancestors all came from Tokuri (supposedly near Welembele) and jointly ventured northwestwards, into thick, uninhabited bush.¹³ Different from Dagara migration-and-settlement narratives, however, such assertions of common origins and/or kinship – joint migration of senior and junior brothers – were not used to claim a superior or dependent status.

A second group of Sisala villages was established in the late eighteenth century – among them Lambussie, Suke, Billaw, Samoa, Kierim, Bouara, and Bourra. In all these settlements, my informants acknowledged that their ancestors ‘met’ the older villages, but again, this did not imply any obligation of deference. The founders of these younger villages came from diverse origins, some from Kassena or Nuni settlements to the north and northeast of their new habitat, others from places further south, which were later occupied by Dagaba immigrants, such as Sankana, Bo, Han, and Ulo.¹⁴

Between the 1860s and 1890s, families who fled from the Muslim warlord Karantao, the Zaberma warriors, or the increasingly violent Dagara expansion founded the third and last group of Sisala settlements, comprising Nabaala, Happa, Dahile, Hamile, Nimoro, Hiela, Bozo, and Kyetuu. Apparently, they settled on the extended land reserves of the older Sisala villages and did so with the latter’s consent, although my informants were sometimes initially reluctant to admit this and preferred to present the usual narrative about their ancestors’ hunting excursions.¹⁵ In any case, even these recently founded settlements enjoyed ritual independence and full property rights over their land from the very beginning.

Different from the negotiable hierarchy of Dagara earth shrines, each Sisala village thus has its own ‘major’ shrine at which the full range of rituals necessary for protection, fertility, and reparation after the violation of taboos can be carried out without referring to other settlements. However, the origins of the stones or other objects at the centre of the earth shrine seem to be as diverse as among the Dagara, except that the Sisala would never admit to having received – and much less purchased – an earth shrine from any previous non-Sisala inhabitant. In ten of the twenty-one Sisala villages that I visited, I was told that the pioneering ancestor carried a stone from the earth shrine in his original settlement to the new place¹⁶; in five cases, it was the earth priest of a neighbouring Sisala village who established a shrine stone for the newcomers (apparently by taking some earth or a stone from his village); and only in six cases was the shrine for the new village said to have been created locally – from an ‘object’ discovered in the bush, from one of the mud bricks used to build the first house, or from a hunting shrine transformed into an earth shrine. No matter where the shrine ‘object’ came from, in most cases it was placed, together with some local stones, in or near the pit where the first-comer supposedly dug out the earth for the construction of his house.¹⁷

Sometimes it was not actually being first-comers but ruse and trickery that determined who could impose himself as the legitimate founder of the earth shrine and thus ‘owner’ of the land. Hiela, for instance, is said to have been founded by a hunter named Kukule and his people. Kukule lived originally in Han but had to flee before the Zaberma warriors. According to Baagyawii Yelgie, a member of the Hiela earth-priestly family, Kukule noticed that nearby Bangwon already existed (people in Bangwon even claim that their ancestors settled Kukule in Hiela) but moved some kilometres further north into an apparently uninhabited area of thick bush. After some time, he met Bokor, another hunter, and a debate over the question of who legitimately owned the place ensued. As one of Bokor’s descendants explained:

Bokor was at Kaa [southeast of Hiela].... He went about hunting, and these people [Kukule and his family] were here [at the site of the Hiela earth shrine]. Bokor did not know they were here. He was going about his hunting activities until the place started opening up. It occurred that one day Kukule and Bokor came across each other. Bokor asked Kukule if he lived here. Kukule said yes, and asked if Bokor also lived here, and Bokor also said yes. As the place opened up, Kukule said that he was the senior [i.e., first-comer]. Bokor said no, that he was senior. What saved Kukule was that there was a pond where they usually went to drink water. Bokor had made a mistake by throwing a broken brick into the water while Kukule had thrown a red stone. Now, when the argument arose between the two, they went down to the pond, and they saw that Bokor’s broken brick had dissolved, while Kukule was able to remove his red stone. Thus, it was proven that you [Kukule’s descendants] are senior, and I [Bokor’s descendant] am next to you.¹⁸

Similar stories about unsuccessful ‘first-comers’ were told in Lambussie, Bourra, and Bouara.¹⁹ Tensions with the successful earth-priestly lineages were usually resolved by allowing the ‘losers’ to control the shrines to the spirits of the bush and/or the water. More generally, in Sisala villages created by immigrants from different places of origin, the offices of totina (earth priest), bakabele (guardian of the bush), and fuotina (guardian of the water) are usually distributed among the different kin groups, while in settlements of more homogenous origins, the totina family also officiates as fuotina and bakabele.²⁰ In this respect, the Sisala ritual organization seems to be as flexible as the Dagara one, with the important difference, however, that ritual hierarchy exists only within, not between, settlements.

The Sisala villages are connected through ties of ‘brotherhood,’ expressed in the idiom of shared origins, and alliances created in the new habitat, symbolized by shared earth-shrine names. The earth shrines of Lambussie and Sentuu (as well as the Dagara settlement Nandom) bear the name ‘Kabir’; the Dahile, Kierim, and Bo shrines are called ‘Bundi’; the Laponé, Pina (Burkina Faso), and Kelendou shrines ‘Nigtulo,’ and the shrines of Bangwon, Happa, and Hiela ‘Niihi.’ The explanations that my informants presented for these names differed, ranging from ‘resisting all suffering’ to ‘seeing and becoming envious’ for Niihi; ‘taking a step backwards’ or ‘having found good food’ for Nigtulo; and ‘killing, sacrificing and eating’ for Bundi. Jack Goody (1957) – following Lawra District Commissioner John Eyre-Smith’s rather speculative history (1933) – saw in common shrine names an indication that an originally very large earth-shrine territory had been gradually sub-divided into minor shrine areas, which retained the original name. Eyre-Smith even believed that all new settlers, be they Dagara or Sisala, continued to recognize the custodian of the oldest shrine as the highest ritual authority in their respective area. However, while these interpretations may partially hold for the Dagara case, they do not apply to Sisala ritual organization. Here, a common shrine name did not necessarily indicate that one village was settled by or had received its shrine from another one. The earth priest of Kierim, for instance, whose shrine name is ‘Bundi,’ claimed that the shrine stone had been brought along from Han, while Bo, another ‘Bundi’ village, asserted to have imported the shrine stone from Tokuri; only my informants in Dahile admitted that their ‘Bundi’ shrine had been installed by someone from Bo. It is likely that, rather than reflecting the settlement history, common shrine names indicate a ritual reinforcement of local alliances against external enemies. My informants in Bangwon, Hiela, and Happa, for instance, explained that all three shrines bore the name ‘Niihi’ because the villages had sworn a solemn oath at the earth shrine to assist each other against any slave-raiding invader.

Just as in the case of mutual assistance in the settlement process, these defensive alliances did not result in hierarchical relations between the Sisala villages. However, Sisala earth priests often do claim continued ritual authority (and property rights) over the settlements of Dagara late-comers who had once asked the Sisala for a shrine stone. The Sisala insist that their Dagara clients should still consult them in all ‘serious’ affairs such as suicide or murder – expectations whose legitimacy the Dagara usually vehemently deny. The fact that the Sisala never admitted such claims among themselves may indicate that they constitute more recent attempts to reinterpret, in the context of diminishing exit options and colonial ‘pacification,’ originally more egalitarian ritual relations with the Dagara immigrants.

MOBILE STONES AND CONTESTED EARTH-SHRINE HIERARCHIES AMONG THE DAGARA

The multifarious, contradictory migration narratives of the different Dagara patriclans and lineages make it difficult to sketch a general picture of the expansionist movement. Already the British District Commissioner John Guinness noted, with some despair, that the Dagara and Sisala chiefs, earth priests and elders of Lawra-Tumu District, whom he interviewed in the early 1930s on the history of their villages, narrated ‘badly beheaded’ stories, reaching back only few generations and presenting a ‘hopeless tangle of sectional migrations and settlements.’²¹ With the exception of Guinness’s and his colleague J. A. Armstrong’s modest attempts to ‘piece together’ a ‘small collection of family stories’²² and the compilation of patriclan migration routes by the French White Father and amateur historian Père Hébert and a small team of indigenous priests (Hébert 1976), the history of Dagara mobility and expansion has not received much scholarly attention.²³ The continued movement of Dagara farmers into new territories further diversified the tableau of migratory routes, and the ‘telescoping’ of genealogies and previous migration stops, typical of oral tradition, partially erased earlier phases of the settlement history from local memory. In short: the difficulties to come up with a comprehensive account of the peopling of the Black Volta region are as discouraging today as they were in Guinness’s times.

The ‘origins’ of the Dagara, or more precisely: the question where a hypothetical proto-Dagara community may have originally lived – beyond the stereotypical tengkor, literally ‘old country’ or ‘old village,’ to which many local narratives refer – remains speculative and is a matter of heated debate among Dagara intellectuals (Lentz 1994). Some general lines of the subsequent movements, however, may be tentatively discerned. While some patriclans trace their migrations back to what is currently northeastern Côte d’Ivoire and the area around Batié (Nord) in Burkina Faso, others claim to have set out from the present-day Wa district and the environs of Nadawli. Most of the migration narratives that we collected (cf. Kuba et al. 2001) make some reference to the area around Babile, Tugu, Konyuokuo, and Zakpe, where the ancestors are supposed to have settled for a while. This micro-region seems to have served like a kind of turntable from which small groups of Dagara migrated further, some in a northerly direction, some then turning westwards, across the Black Volta, into present-day southwestern Burkina Faso, some remaining east of the Volta and continuing north and north-eastwards, and others, finally, crossing the river more than once.

While it is problematic to speak of Dagara expansion in terms of a self-conscious, planned conquest of new territories for the entire group, the available evidence does suggest that the continuous colonization of new frontiers was more than just the involuntary by-product of the fission of domestic groups and individual mobility. Dagara migration-and-settlement narratives invariably emphasize the pioneer spirit of the ancestors, be they portrayed as hunters, warriors, or great hoe-farmers, and a more or less aggressively asserted feeling of superiority of the Dagara over the earlier inhabitants. There was a strongly developed sense of pushing the ‘frontier ... on the margin of the inhabited world,’ setting out from the ‘hinterland’ and moving into ‘outlying areas which are both a source of danger and a coveted prize,’ as Ladis Kristof characterized frontier processes (1959: 270–71). Furthermore, the Dagara frontiersmen aimed at securing larger territories, not only for themselves and their immediate relatives, but also for their entire patriclan.²⁴ In this sense, the history of Dagara mobility can indeed be characterized as a history of expansion.

Even today, most Dagara find it neither astonishing nor problematic that many nuclear families move up to three times in the course of an adult life and that in most domestic groups some members have moved out and settled elsewhere. More generally, the ideal of autonomy, i.e., of becoming the head of a house (yirsob), is rated highly and may account for the relatively easy and frequent fission of Dagara patrilineages. Tensions and conflicts between siblings are given as one of the reasons for leaving the father’s compound, but another is the lack of available land. However, when informants reported that their ancestors migrated because of ‘hunger’ and ‘in search of food,’ this usually does not refer to any objectively measurable scarcity of land but culturally defined ideals of sufficient space and decision-making power.

The Dagara continued to extend the area where they settle and farm up until today, but colonial domination had a profound impact on mobility and ethnic relations. The imposition of the pax colonia largely removed the opportunities to use violence in the appropriation of new territories, and thus changed the balance of power in favour of the Sisala and halted the advance of Dagara earth-shrine areas. Indeed, since the 1920s, the Dagara no longer created new earth shrines or acquired tengan kubile from the Sisala but were forced to establish their new settlements on territory owned and ritually controlled by the Sisala (or Phuo).

For my Dagara interlocutors, an earth shrine created from stones of non-Dagara origin is neither less nor more powerful than one using Dagara-made stones. Indeed, in ten of the thirty-one Dagara villages east of the Black Volta in which I collected details about the origins of the earth shrines, I was told that the shrine stone was given by, or purchased from, the previous inhabitants, namely Sisala, Phuo, or Nuni.²⁵ In two villages, the Dagara frontiersmen were said to have brought the shrine stone from their original settlements. In five cases, the earth shrine had evolved either out of what was once a tengankubile, a small shrine established for the new settlers by one of the older Dagara villages, or out of a wiekuur, a ‘field’ or ‘bush shrine,’ which the newcomers had installed themselves. The remaining fourteen villages had only tengankubile and were still obliged to consult the tengankpee in neighbouring Dagara villages for all ‘serious’ cases.

Dagara earth shrines are territorial cults that communicate with the earth god and regulate a community’s appropriation of the natural resources in a circumscribed area. At the same time, however, they can develop into centres of ‘de-territorialized’ mobile healing cults. The ritual healing power of such earth shrines can extend far beyond the area for which the shrines serve as territorial cults. Some earth shrines have become particularly famous for their extraordinary power to grant fertility, health, and prosperity, and people come from near and far in order to sacrifice at the shrine for the solution of their personal problems. These clients as well as the inhabitants of the shrine’s village, if they wish to travel or establish themselves elsewhere, can ask the earth priest for a small stone from the shrine for their personal protection. These travelling shrine stones are kept effective by regularly ‘charging their battery,’ as my informants put it, through sacrifices at the original shrine in gratitude for the earth god’s good services.²⁶ In the settlement process, these mobile stones could eventually be ‘re-territorialized,’ laying the basis for a personal or lineage protective shrine in a newly founded village or even an earth shrine, if the shrine keepers succeeded in claiming first-comer status vis-à-vis later immigrants. However, the nature of the new shrine – personal healing, lineage protective, or supra-lineage territorial cult – and its obligations towards the original shrine were, and continue to be, often subject to intense debate.

In Eremon, for instance, an old Dagara village in the vicinity of Lawra, the earth-priestly lineage brought a stone (tengkuur) from the earth shrine in their original village, Tie. The stone, my informants explained, is called ‘Nyoor,’ a name derived from the word nyuvor, ‘breath’ or ‘life,’ and they spoke of Nyoor both as tengan, earth god, and as sigra, guardian spirit of the Naayire patriclan to which they belonged.²⁷ Nyoor is thus not only venerated at the Eremon earth shrine but in every Naayire house where small Nyoor stones are put down for protection. My informants also claimed that a number of Dagara villages north of Eremon, namely Varpuo, Piiri, Panyaan, Gegenkpe, Baseble, and parts of Tom, Ko, and Nandom, had been established thanks to their ancestors’ assistance. The founders of these settlements ‘were strangers, who came looking for food, and our fathers allocated land to them. They were made to understand that the land on which they were settling belongs to Nyoor.’ After having ‘paid’ for the installation of the Nyoor shrine, they were eventually allowed to conduct their own sacrifices but still had to come back to Eremon from time to time. These claims, however, were confirmed only in Varpuo, Panyaan, and some sections of Tom – that is, in villages created by members of patriclans closely related with the Naayire.²⁸ Informants from other places, which the Eremon earth priest asserted to be under Nyoor’s authority, insisted that their ancestors had actually established their earth shrines without any external assistance or received a stone not from the Eremon Nyoor shrine but rather from the ‘Kabir’ earth shrines of Lambussie or Ko.²⁹ Indeed, it was in Ko that I first learnt that earth shrines could serve both as territorial and healing cults. My informants in Ko related how their ancestors brought a Kabir earth-shrine stone from their original village Nabing, in what is today Nuni land in Burkina Faso, and later installed Kabir shrines in numerous other Dagara villages – in Guo, a section of Tom, Tankyara, Baseble, Sone, Gegenkpe, Piiri, Panyaan, Domagyie, and even some settlements across the Black Volta, such as Memer and Nakaar.³⁰ When I expressed my puzzlement about how an earth-shrine stone’s jurisdiction – and the property rights that it helps to legitimate – could reach across the river, the Ko earth priest explained that the boundary between territorial and protective cults was not as firm as I had until then believed. He insisted that Ko did hold ultimate property rights over the land of neighbouring villages with Kabir tenganbile such as Guo and parts of Tom. But in other cases, Kabir served rather as a powerful healing cult, not an earth shrine:

It was the tengan itself that went across the river, and not us [the Ko tengandem] who sent it there. If one is faced with a very serious problem, one will go at every length for solutions – which they [the villagers of Nakaar, Memer, etc.] heard existed here. So we established the Ko Kabir in order to solve the problems these villages faced.… In some respects, the land ‘belongs’ (so) to Ko, since Ko Kabir is there. But that doesn’t mean that Ko has any authority over the farmlands of that particular village and can seize them from the owners!

It is precisely this ambiguity between ritual and economic ‘ownership’ that the earth priests in Eremon exploited in order to convince me that they ‘controlled’ a very large area. Similarly, it seems to be the long-standing competition between the two powerful earth-cum-healing cults, Nyoor and Kabir, which accounts for shifting ritual allegiances of some villages in the Lawra and Nandom area – allegiances which some interested parties have attempted to interpret as connected with an allodial title in land.

As I went on interviewing Dagara earth priests and other informants about the history of their particular shrines and earth shrines in general, I learnt about a puzzling variety of medicinal, hunting, and field shrines and listened to competing views about permissible transformations of these shrines into tenganbile or even tengankpee. Neither did my interlocutors agree on the terminology, nor were they in accord about the question who was authorized to establish which shrines and who benefited from their protection. Some insisted that wiekuur (‘bush stones’) were exclusively hunting shrines and, although ultimately under the control of the earth priest, could never be transformed into earth shrines because the latter only accept domestic animals as sacrificial gifts while hunting shrines have to be ‘fed’ with wild animals. Others explained that only particular patriclans, namely the Kpagnyaane and the Gane, could establish proper hunting shrines, and that members of these clans always took some wiekube along on their migrations and could, when they founded a new settlement, create an earth shrine from these stones. Still others used the terms wiekuur and puotiib (field medicine) interchangeably and held dissenting views on the question whether non–earth-priestly lineages were allowed to establish such shrines autonomously, only with the consent of the earth priest, or not at all. And they disagreed whether a field shrine protected only the fields of a particular lineage or of an entire village section, thus functioning as a tengankubile, and whether it could eventually be transformed into a tengankpee.

These contradictory statements about the nature and potential trajectories of hunting, field, and earth shrines reflect the fact that creating new villages on the frontier was a gradual process. When the frontiersmen ‘discovered’ a suitable site and constructed their first provisional huts, they often did not see an immediate need to establish an earth shrine, because they felt sufficiently protected by their mobile personal and clan ‘medicines’ (tii) and various hunting and field shrines. An earth shrine only became necessary when the women and further settlers from different patriclans arrived. The earth cult regulated the social relations between the first-comers and these late-comers by instituting taboos against violence, bloodshed, and illicit sexual encounters (‘in the bush’) and by ritually sanctioning the leading role of the earth-priestly lineage. The continued fertility of the land, the women and the domestic animals, so the Dagara and their neighbours believed, could not be ensured without internally peaceful relations and the good offices of an earth priest. However, just as the settlement history, clan composition, and interaction between first-comers and late-comers varied from village to village, so did the specific circumstances of the creation of an earth shrine and its relation to existing protective and medicinal shrines.

Furthermore, the negotiable rapport between the various shrines and cults allowed ritual hierarchies to adapt to changing constellations of power. In principle, the tengansob had to, and still has to, be informed about, and give his consent to, the installation of any other shrine or cult, be they part of a patriclan’s ancestral traditions or newly imported ‘foreign’ medicines against witchcraft or theft. However, the authority of the tengan was, and still is, usually imposed only post facto: the illicit introduction of a new protective cult or the arrogation of tengankpee powers by a tenganbile is only ‘discovered’ (and punished) when a diviner attributes specific incidences of death, infertility, illness, or other misfortunes to this transgression. However, depending on their influence and power, the transgressor and his followers may either make reparations at the tengankpee or decide to ignore the diviner’s dictum and, if they already live at some distance from the major earth shrine, opt for ritual secession. If misfortune continues to trouble the new ritual community, they may eventually reorient themselves towards the original shrine. Thus, instead of seeking to condense the welter of shrines names and attributes into a well-ordered taxonomy, we should understand that the contradictory terminology and explanations that my interlocutors put forward are part and parcel of the ongoing negotiation of ritual hierarchies.

Negotiation as well as conflict also characterized the relations between the Dagara pioneers and the earth priests of older Sisala and Phuo villages. While the incoming Dagara were usually aware of their existence and sometimes sought their consent before settling, there was always an alternative, though confrontational strategy, namely to establish an earth shrine through filiation with an existing Dagara shrine. The latter became symbols around which local identities could crystallize and helped to transcend the latent antagonism between individual houses or patriclan segments. Some villages, such as Ouessa, thus ritually controlled over a dozen villages and hamlets where they had established branches of their earth shrines (tengankubile), and although earth priests were never themselves military leaders, they may have played a considerable role in mobilizing military alliances – for instance, against Sisala or Phuo resistance. The system of hierarchical earth shrines may thus be seen as a cultural strategy capable of creating solidarity and military support beyond the immediate local community.

However, ritual dependency on senior Dagara villages did not exclude the possibility that the new Dagara settlers eventually also came to terms with their Sisala or Phuo neighbours. Indeed, they often did so, following initial conflict, by acquiring an additional earth shrine, which could then be used to gain independence from the older Dagara settlements. Indeed, this may have been the major motive for the new Dagara frontiersmen to negotiate with the Sisala or Phuo for an earth-shrine stone.

My informants sometimes compared the transfer of an earth shrine (and the allodial title to the land) between different groups, and particularly across ethnic boundaries, to a ‘marriage.’ Because of its intimate association with fertility, land is regarded as a woman, and the Dagara often interpret the cowries and cows that they claim to have exchanged with the Sisala for the allodial title as the ‘bride price’ that they have paid to the bride’s family, that is, the landowners. In Ouessa, for instance, some informants claimed that the earth shrine was given by the Phuo, or Sisala, in recompensation for saving the life of one of the original earth priest’s women or sparing the earth priest’s wife when attacking the previous landowners. In other cases, the Dagara claim to have received the earth shrine in exchange, not for cowries and cows, but directly for a marriageable woman. Although the Sisala and Nuni nowadays usually deny having ever received such a ‘bride price,’ ‘wife,’ or any other payment, for the land, they often do concur with the land–woman equation. There is disagreement, however, about the practical consequences of this metaphorical equation, particularly concerning the land/woman’s relationship with her original family/owner. In Bayagra, for instance, east of Niégo, the Sisala of Kelendou insisted that when the Dagara family had temporarily abandoned the land that their grandfathers had once transferred to them, the wife/land returned to its original house, and if the Dagara family wanted her/it back, they needed to plead with the Sisala owners once again.³¹ Thus in the eyes of the land-givers, the land transfer established a relationship that implies the retention of a strong bond of the ‘gift’ to the original owners, or, in other words: even after marriage, the woman always remains a full member of her paternal house. The Dagara land receivers, on the other hand, usually argue that the separation of the woman from her family is complete, to all intents and purposes, once the bride price has been paid. As my Dagara informants in Niégo explained, after acquiring an earth-shrine stone from Hiela, they never called any Sisala names during sacrifices but only those of their own ancestors because it was ‘like in marriage, and when we marry, the woman no longer belongs to her family; from time to time she may write letters to them or visit them, but we [the husband’s house] would have nothing to do with them.’³²

In any case, an earth shrine is not an ethnically bounded resource. In the eyes of the Phuo and Sisala, the already-established Dagara settlers were just as much ‘late-comers’ as the more recent Dagara arrivals. For the latter, the hierarchical relationship with an older Dagara settlement may have implied heavier burdens than the ritual dependency from another ethnic group. Moreover, the Sisala and Phuo were not merely passive victims of the Dagara expansion but often seem to have actively asserted their rights. What kind of ritual protection the new Dagara settlement finally chose, whether from a senior Dagara village or the Phuo or Sisala neighbours, depended on the specific local power relations.

CONCLUSION

In the Black Volta region, earth shrines stand at the centre of territorial as well as mobile healing cults. At the same time, they constitute economic, social and political institutions. This article has explored how frontiersmen and late-comers established, expanded, or transmitted earth shrines and how these practices arose in response to the challenges of securing ritual protection and property rights in a socio-historical context of mobility. Focusing on the relations between Sisala ‘first-comers’ and Dagara ‘late-comers,’ that is: a frontier situation characterized by ethnic heterogeneity, we can distinguish three phases of earth-shrine related politics. The first covered the time until the beginning of the colonial regime and was characterized by the ‘autochthonization’ of the newcomers who managed to acquire full property rights and ritual authority over their new habitat – even though sometimes the previous inhabitants later attempted to reclaim their original property. There were several ways how an allodial title could be established. In some cases, the Dagara frontiersmen moved indeed into ‘uninhabited’ territory, or successfully drove the previous inhabitants away, and established their own earth shrine, often around a stone that they had carried along from their original village. In many cases, however, the Dagara pioneers had to come to terms with previous inhabitants. Sometimes, they received the allodial title to the land together with an earth-shrine stone from the Sisala, usually in exchange for some substantial gifts (although the previous owners sometimes later denied that this exchange ever took place). In other cases, they acquired only the land and placed it under the protection of an existing Dagara earth shrine. In a few cases, however, mounting tensions with the custodians of this older earth shrine or unexpected problems such as inexplicable deaths, lack of drinking water or drought could motivate the new settlers to acquire from their Sisala neighbours an additional shrine stone, replacing – or complementing – the Dagara earth shrine.

These strategies of extending existing earth-shrine areas and, when confronted with competing property claims, negotiating with the Sisala for an allodial title, continued into the second, intermediate phase, lasting approximately until the 1920s. However, although the Sisala sometimes seem to have ritually validated the expansion of Dagara property claims by accepting substantial gifts in exchange for the additional land put under Dagara authority, they more or less stopped giving earth-shrine stones to their Dagara neighbours. The narratives concerning these transfers are usually hotly contested and subject to current re-interpretations, which makes it difficult to assess the extent to which full property rights still passed from Sisala into Dagara hands. In any case, it is highly probable that after the 1920s, during the third phase, the transfer of ritual authority – and shrine stones – to the Dagara ceased altogether, and the Dagara thus no longer became fully fledged land owners, although they continued to found new settlements. The pax colonia, which only really became effective in the Black Volta region from the 1910s onwards, definitely changed the balance of power in favour of the Sisala, by removing the opportunities to use violence in the appropriation of new territories. The Sisala refusal to cede earth shrines to the expanding Dagara suggests that the previous transfer of earth shrines had perhaps not been quite as ‘voluntary’ as some narratives claim. On the other hand, in the 1930s and 1940s, a good number of Dagara opted deliberately to settle outside Dagara earth-shrine parishes, on territory controlled ritually and politically by the Sisala, because they wanted to escape the particularly harsh rule of some Dagara paramount chiefs. Thus much of the current landscape of allodial titles is due to the colonial ‘freezing’ of a previously more dynamic situation, but only because some local actors were only too happy to support colonial officials’ ideas about the impossibility of ‘alienating’ ancestral land, and others thought it better to live on ‘foreign’ land. This ‘freezing’ of property transfers, however, did not put an end to the contestation and re-interpretation of claims to ownership and of the history of the earth shrines, on the contrary. Up until today, particularly those allodial titles that were acquired in the turbulent last decades before colonial rule are closely scrutinized and, when changing power constellations provide room for manoeuvre, questioned.

NOTES

1. Considerable controversy has surrounded the ‘Dagara’ ethnic names. British colonial administrators introduced the terms ‘Dagarti’ and ‘Lobi,’ which some Ghanaians continue to use. French district commissioners often referred to the term ‘Dagari,’ which is still used by many Burkinabè. Jack Goody (1956: 16–26) introduced the term LoDagaa, which he subdivided further into the LoDagaba and the LoWiili. Most of those so labelled reject all of these names as incorrect or even pejorative, but there is much discussion of what to use instead. Some believe that the people living around Wa, Nadawli, and Jirapa (in Ghana) form a distinct group, the ‘Dagaba,’ speaking their own dialect, ‘Dagaare’; that most of the settlements around Diébougou and Dano (in Burkina Faso) are inhabited by the ‘Wiile,’ speaking yet another dialect; and that the term ‘Dagara’ finally, should be reserved for the speakers of the ‘Lobr’ dialect, that is, the population of Lawra, Nandom, and parts of southwestern Burkina Faso. Others hold that ‘Dagara’ is the only correct unitary term for both the language and the ethnic group. For more details on the controversies on ethnic names, see Lentz (2000a):120–24, and Bemile (2000). For simplicity’s sake and because most of my discussion indeed refers to the speakers of the ‘Lobr’ dialect, I use the term ‘Dagara’ throughout this article.
2. This project was part of the interdisciplinary Special Research Project 268 (Sonderforschungsbereich) on the West African savannah, at the University of Frankfurt/Main. Field work was carried out mostly between 1997 and 2002, with the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. For some results of our project, see Kuba (2006), Kuba et al. (2001), Kuba and Lentz (2002; 2006), Lentz (2005), and Werthmann (2006) and Oberhofer (2008). I am particularly grateful to my co-researcher Richard Kuba for our many inspiring discussions, and to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, which provided a congenial environment for the first analysis of my interview material and for the conception of the basic outline of my book, Land, Mobility and Belonging (that unfortunately, due to many administrative commitments, is still a ‘work in progress’).
3. Some of the material in this section has already been published in Lentz and Kuba (2002).
4. Interviews with Laponé Kuoro (chief) Kumasi et al., 22 Feb. 2000; Mahama Baanuomake et al., Bo, 10 Dec. 1997; Zankor Bahiise et al., Dahile, 10 Dec. 1997; Happa Kuoro Hilleh Babrimatoh et al., 30 Nov. 1994.
5. Interviews with Bozo Kuoro (chief) Banuosin Kel-le et al., 17 Dec. 1997; Bourra Kuoro Issa Nadie et al., 27 Nov. 2001; Bouara Kuoro Nawie Zogyir et al., 19 Dec. 1997. On the ‘pregnant-woman-slit-open’ motif, see also Schott (1990).
6. The only exception seems to be a legend reported by Edward Tengan (1994: 15), which explains the separation of the Kuwere patriclan from the original Kpiele house with a ‘pregnant-woman-slit-open’ story.
7. Interviews with Topulwy Bukari et al., Piina (Burkina Faso), 26 Jan. 1998; Hiela Kuoro Emoho Yelgie, Baagyawii Yelgie et al., Hiela, 18 Dec. 1997, 22 Feb. 1999; Hamile Kuoro Puli Nagie, Bewaar Bei et al., Hamile, 29 Dec. 1996; Tigwii S. Amoah, Hamile, 13 Dec. 1997; Kierim Kuoro Bombie Naagyie, Buuyor Naagie et al., Kierim, 19 Dec. 1997; Mahama Baanuomake et al., Bo, 10 Dec. 1997.
8. Interviews with Tigwii S. Amoah, Hamile, 12 Dec. 1997, 20 Jan. 1998, 10 Feb. 1999, and 26 Feb. 2000. On the static ideal model of the lineage among the Sisala, see also Mendonsa (1979); on the spiritual power of Sisala elders and the role of divination and the ancestor cult in controlling the migration of dependent juniors, Mendonsa (1982): 50–53, 149–210; (2001): 185–218.
9. As in many Sisala settlement narratives, Leke merged the names of the village and of its founding ancestor.
10. Interview with Leke Siino, Bangwon Kuoro Yinaroh Wiyor et al., 11 Dec. 1997.
11. Interview with Piina Kuoro Bakuoro Yesibie et al., 12 Dec. 1997. John Guinness and J. A. Armstrong, two colonial administrators collecting information on the regional settlement history in the 1930s, reported that the Bangwon earth priest stated that his ancestors originally came from ‘Jaffiung’ [Jaffien] (John Guinness, Interim Report on the Peoples of Nandom and Lambussie, 1932; J. A. Armstrong, Report on the Peoples of the Lambussie and Nandom Divisions, 1931/1934; National Archives of Ghana (Accra) (NAG), ADM 11/1/824).
12. Entry in the Lawra District Record Book by Captain Taylor, 21 April 1906, NAG, ADM 61/5/2: 34.
13. Interviews with Piina Kuoro Bakuoro Yesibie et al., 12 Dec. 1997; and Mahama Baanuomake et al., Bo, 10 Dec. 1997.
14. Interviews with the Lambussie earth priest Nasie Isifu Tomo et al., 29 Nov. 1994; Darte Bason Boyuo et al., Lambussie, 2 Dec. 1994; Billaw Kuoro Forkoh Manoh, the Billaw earth priest Kager Banuosin et al., 3 Dec. 1994; Samoa Kuoro Shaku Tigwii et al., 28 Nov. 2001; Suke Kuoro George Yiriminor Mawiise et al., 28 Nov. 2000; Kierim Kuoro Bombie Naagyie et al., 19 Dec. 1997; Bouara Kuoro Nawie Zongyir et al., 19 Dec. 1997; Bourra Kuoro Issa Nadie, Naoulé Siyil et al., 27 Nov. 2001.
15. Interviews with Happa Kuoro Hilleh Babrimatoh et al., 30 Nov. 1994; Zanko Bahiise et al., Dahile, 10 Dec. 1997; Nabaala Kuoro Kanii Kambang, 4 Dec. 1994; Suleiman Balesemule et al., Nimoro, 14 Dec. 1997; Baagyawii Yelgie et al., Hiela, 18 Dec. 1997; Hiela Kuoro Emoho Yelgie et al., 22 Feb. 1999; Kyetuu Kuoro Niepor Kombui et al., 16 Dec. 1997, 22 Feb. 1999; Bozo Kuoro Banuosin Kel-le, 17 Dec. 1997.
16. These places of origin included Ulo, Han, and Tokuri, as well as Bon, Millo (?), and Setii, currently inhabited by Nuni and Kassena. It was not quite clear whether the frontiersmen were believed to have actually carried a physical object or rather the spiritual power enabling them to become earth priests in their new home. The Phuo and Winye, who are closely related to the Sisala, distinguish between two sources of earth-priestly power: membership in a specific ‘noble’ lineage and first-comership (see Jacob 2003; Kuba 2006). Among the Sisala, however, no one originating from an earth-priestly family would automatically have the right to establish a new earth shrine unless he could also successfully claim first-comer status.
17. On this, see also Tengan (1991): 84–88. However, Tengan’s informants apparently only claimed a ‘local’ origin for their earth-shrine stones and made no mention of ancestors carrying stones along on their journey. Unfortunately, Tengan does not specify his analysis according to the different villages where he gathered information, but in Piina (Ghana), where one of his main informants lived, the earth priest told me that the shrine stone was imported from Tokuri. It would be interesting to compare these different versions.
18. Interview with Baagyawie Yelgie, Balitor Naagie et al., Hiela, 18 Dec. 1997. Interestingly, in a second interview with members of the earth-priestly lineage, where none of Bokor’s descendants were present, the contest between Kukule and Bokor was not mentioned; interview with Hiela Kuoro Emoho Yelgie et al., 22 Feb. 1999.
19. See Tengan (1991): 81–84 and Schott (1993) for further examples.
20. Interviews with Tigwii S. Amoah, Hamile, 9 Dec. 1997, 20 Jan. 1998, and 10 Feb. 1999.
21. Lawra-Tumu District Commissioner John Guinness, Interim Report on the Peoples of Nandom and Lambussie, 1932, NAG, ADM 11/1/824, § 1, 11, 41. For more details on Guinness’s report and the harsh criticism it provoked among other colonial officers, see Lentz (1999): 146–58. It is interesting to note, however, that in many of my own interviews, Guinness’s findings on migration routes were corroborated.
22. Guinness, ibid., § 1; J. A. Armstrong, Report on the Peoples of the Lambussie and Nandom Divisions in the Lawra-Tumu District, 1931/1934, NAG, ADM 11/1/824.
23. The few more comprehensive accounts of Dagara expansion – Der (1989), Goody (1993), Hien (2001), and Somda (1989) – are based on a rather limited corpus of interviews and, like the micro-studies (in the form of B.A. dissertations), tend to take oral traditions at face value without systematically comparing contradictory versions (if they ever collected more than one version).
24. On the territorial strategies of patriclans and lineages, see also the case studies in Perrot (2000).
25. These villages were Lawra, Goziir, Nandom, Burutu, Ko, Kokoligu, Ouessa, Niégo, Dadoune, and Kondon. However, in Lawra, Burutu, Ko, Ouessa, and Kondon, there were competing versions that denied such a ‘foreign’ origin of the earth shrine.
26. For an instructive analysis of the nationwide ritual networks around such a mobile-medicinal-cum-territorial cult, namely the Tongnaab in the Bolgatanga area, see Allman and Parker (2005).
27. Interview with Kporkar, Dome Tang et al., Eremon, 22 Dec. 1994. On the concept of the personal and clan guardian spirit (sigra), see Goody (1962): 410–11; on Nyoor, Goody (1957): 70–83. Taking Nyoor only for a territorial cult, Goody interprets the spatial distribution of Nyoor stones as an indication of the original boundaries of the earth-shrine parish, which is highly problematic.
28. Interviews with Panyaan Naa Edward Yirbekyaa et al., 23 Dec. 1996; Tom Naa Severio Termaghre, Nandom, 26 Dec. 1996; and the earth priest of Varpuo, Damian Bognye et al., 22 Nov. 1989 (interview by Barbara Habig). On Tom, see also Goody (1957).
29. Interviews with Gegenkpe Naa Yebpone Babai Tuolong III et al., 26 Dec. 1996; Gaamuo Mwinpuo Le-ib et al., Nandomkpe, 11 Dec. 1989; Dibaar, Nandomkpe, 29 Dec. 1994; and Soglikuu-Saakum et al., Nandom-Bilegang, 17 Dec. 1994.
30. Interview with Ko Naa James Bayuo, tengansob Gabriel Tangsege et al., Ko, 18 Dec. 1994.
31. Interview with Mwiensang Somda Kondon, Bayagra, 4 Mar. 1999.
32. Interview with Somda Beyaa et al, Niégo, 23 Feb. 1999.

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