UNEXPECTED DIFFERENCES IN INFORMAL INSTITUTIONS OF RECIPROCITY AND CITIZENSHIP IN SIMILAR VILLAGES OF GHANA AND CôTE D'IVOIRE

When I arrived in these villages in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana and the Abengourou region of Côte d'Ivoire in the late 1990s, I expected to see many similarities. I was interested in examining the informal institutions of reciprocity and indigenous concepts of citizenship so I had carefully chosen villages that were analogous to each other and representative of their similar regions on a number of critical theoretical criteria. To begin, I thought these four villages would be more similar than different because they shared the same precolonial Akan culture, history, and politics. Well before the establishment of British and French colonial rule in the late 1800s and early 1900s, these villages had all been settled by Akan peoples who resisted incorporation into an expanding Asante empire. The Akan continued to be the predominant ethnic group in each of the villages so I knew the villages still shared similar indigenous institutions of chieftaincy, justice, land tenure, and matrilineal inheritance.

I anticipated that the local economies were alike, too, because Akan farmers had adopted cocoa as the main cash crop around the same time in the early 1900s. These farmers had since encouraged a minority settlement of migrant workers from the North and Sahel, and had recently been challenged by drought and bushfires in the exact same years in the early 1980s.