Search Results

* A Forest for My Kingdom? “Forest Rent” and the Politics of History in Asante (Ghana)

Sara Berry

in The Social Lives of Forests: Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence

This chapter presents a case study in Asante exploring the tension over land and the place of “traditional authority” in contemporary social life and land use, as well as the shifting power dynamic ... More

This chapter presents a case study in Asante exploring the tension over land and the place of “traditional authority” in contemporary social life and land use, as well as the shifting power dynamic between centralizing states and decentralized chiefly power. Reinforced during the colonial era and partially dismantled as part of an attempt by Ghana's first president to undo the colonial legacy, chiefly influence has re-emerged more recently when debates over the status and future of Asante's shrinking forests intersected with the neoliberal agenda. Plans for sustainable development, including forest recovery, often rest on imaginaries of bygone forests and implicit ideas about the relevance of knowledge about the past for present and future practice. Over the course of the 20th century, the social life of Asante forests reflected not only the power of market forces to remake natural environments, but also the ways in which market transactions, political contests and bureaucratic practices intersect with historical imagination. By raising the stakes in making claims of “original ownership,” recent efforts to rehabilitate Ghana's forests by privatizing them run the risk of increasing opportunities for rent-seeking and social exclusion, at the expense of equitable access and sustainable management.Less

Colonizing Banro: Kingship, Temporality, and Mining of Futures in the Goldfields of South Kivu, DRC

James Smith

John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (eds)

in The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa

In chapter eleven, Smith explores further the role of artisanal miners in the relationship between corporate capital and chiefly authority, here in the South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo ... More

In chapter eleven, Smith explores further the role of artisanal miners in the relationship between corporate capital and chiefly authority, here in the South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Local, but ardently anti-custom, these “organic scientists” (geologues), as they call themselves, have protested against contemporary Bwami (“chiefship”), whose office-holders, they claim, have used their power to ally themselves with the likes of Banro, a foreign mining firm whose exploitative practices have antagonized the surrounding communities. The result of the complicated, evanescent relationship between the mine, customary rulers, the geologues, and other interested parties here makes plain quite how complex and entangled are the connections between capital and custom, and how deep an impact they may have on local households and communities, many of them impoverished, even destroyed, as those connections play themselves out. In the face of rising “neotribal” capitalism, Smith shows, negotiating the labyrinthine ties linking technologies of power, jurisdiction, and suzerainty – against the background of the presumptive “feudalism” of local African sovereignty -- may become matters of life and death.Less