My article on chieftaincy-related conflicts in Ghana appears today at the Globe and Mail online, coinciding with national elections there scheduled for Sunday. The piece was assigned and written months ago, while I was in West Africa and the town of Bawku was still under a 6pm-6am curfew in the wake of some brutal attacks. The fighting there was over which tribe was entitled to the local chieftaincy and was unhelpfully fueled by national party politics.

Although Ghana is generally talked up as one of the most stable and democratic countries in Africa, there are a worrying number of disputes that happen at the nexus of chiefly and partisan political power. Bawku is but the most dramatic recent example.

The elections here and in the U.S. resulted in the piece getting bumped and bumped and bumped. Now that it is running it’s been bumped from the pages of the newspaper to the internet only. Something about a political/constitutional crisis in this country and declining page counts thanks to the economic downturn. Which is fair enough. But I can’t also help feeling that it reflects, once again, Africa’s low priority in our media—unless, of course, something particularly awful and newsworthy happens. Reporting on Ghana’s election has been sparse overall, BBC Online being the rare exception. If violence does occur post-election, and it threatens the region’s stability, it will make news then. But any analytic reporting that attempts to anticipate what might happen in advance too often doesn’t make it through the noise.

I updated the article in the past couple weeks and according to most reports pre-election violence in Ghana has abated. The picture at head is of Bawku’s almost deserted main intersection only minutes before the daily, army-enforced curfew was to take effect. The intersection is also the dividing line between rival Kusasi and Mamprusi neighborhoods. This is a snap of the current Bawku Naba (chief), Asigri Abugrago Azoka II of the Kusasi tribe, whose legitimacy has been challenged by Maprusis—a decades-old dispute that has frequently spilled over into bloodshed.

Violence in Bawku this past July resulted in the firebombing of several shops. Motorcycle taxis on the Mamprusi side of town complain that they can’t work certain parts of Bawku for fear of violent attacks and thefts.


Christopher Frey
www.brokenatlas.com

Broken Atlas is the virtual woodshed of Christopher Frey, a Toronto-based journalist who writes on culture, economics and technology in a globalizing world. The book Broken Atlas will be published by Random House in 2010.