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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Disguising Chiefs and God as History: Questions on the Acephalousness of LoDagaa Politics and Religion
Author:Hawkins, SeanISNI
Year:1996
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
Volume:66
Issue:2
Pages:202-247
Language:English
Geographic term:Ghana
Subjects:African religions
deities
Dagari
chieftaincy
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Religion and Witchcraft
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/1161317
Abstract:This article examines two periods in the historiography of the LoDagaa of northern Ghana and analyses the similarities between them. In the late 1920s the institution of chieftaincy was written into LoDagaa history by colonial administrators, only two decades after they themselves had created that institution in a society they had once considered bereft of political authority. By the early 1930s colonial administrators had created a historical fiction, namely that chiefs had always existed among the LoDagaa. This finessing of the past has bequeathed ambiguities evident in contemporary attitudes toward the position of chiefs among the LoDagaa. Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s the indigenous clergy among the LoDagaa, who had taken over from the missionaries in the 1960s, began to reassess the nature of God in indigenous religious thought in order to narrow the distance between LoDagaa culture and Catholicism. LoDagaa priests reexamined indigenous religion and discovered the existence of belief in a single deity which had been neglected by earlier missionaries. However, the notion of the premissionary worship of God is as much a historical fiction as the idea of the existence of chiefs in the precolonial period. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French.
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