Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana

Barb Bloemhof is an instructor of economics at McMaster University in
Hamilton.

In this book, Sean Hawkins argues that writing is a tool of power and
colonialism that impacted the indigenous people that Europeans found. He
uses five types of documents (administrative, anthropological,
missionary, indigenous, and judicial texts) to assess the use of writing
to “invent, appropriate and colonize” a group of people, the
LoDagaa, who lived in the valley of the Black Volta in northwestern
Ghana. These texts cover approximately a century of history, from the
end of the 1890s to the early 1990s, and the author concludes that the
British were not entirely successful in their colonialism.

Hawkins develops the impact of the predominant western values on the
cultural institutions of the LoDagaa, proving that writing is not
neutral. His strongest support for this highly nuanced argument comes
from the judicial texts, a new source not previously brought to
historical or anthropological analysis. The judicial records of speech
in courts give the context of the values under assault by the British,
because the LoDagaa must defend in these contrived court situations what
would otherwise not be subjected to the theoretical treatment of a
Western legal approach. The rights and claims so defended may not have
been the subjects of conflict between the LoDagaa themselves, framed as
they were in British values and definitions of property rights;
additionally, the legal institutions facilitated by writing impose a
different dichotomy of private/public (taking the private into the
public and silencing the public) because those wielding the pen approach
it with their own “political and ideological assumptions.”

The problem with this book is methodological. Because it is based on
written texts, any comparisons of pre- and postcolonial times are mired
by the lack of written texts for that earlier time, when the
anthropological evidence suggests the LoDagaa had already passed a
history that could be measured in centuries. Without texts to support
claims about the pre-1890 situation, different evidence is needed to
assess that time period, which weakens the analysis. Personifying “the
world on paper” gives overarching power to the argument that written
history creates a culture; the fact that the author himself uses these
tools of analysis makes the argument either quite clever or completely
tautological.