In this chapter we shall examine the problems, structure, personnel, and policies of the British administration in Dagomba from the time of the partition down to the advent of ‘indirect rule’ in the 1930s. We shall also explore aspects and consequences of the isolation of the Northern Territories from the rest of the Gold Coast: this isolation. I shall suggest, led to the entrenchment in power of a group of officers whom, on account of their cohesion and independence, I shall refer to as ‘the northern interest’. These officers also had a distinctly pragmatic view of ‘native administration’, a topic to which we shall return in Chapter 4.

The partition of the Dagomba kingdom was formalised on 14 November 1899 by the signing of a convention concerned with ‘the settlement of the Samoan and other questions’. An earlier agreement delimiting British and German spheres of influence had made an equally magnificent sweep of the imperial globe: an agreement, as its title grandly stated, ‘respecting Africa and Heligoland’. With similar panache, the British then created, by Order-in-Council, the Protectorate of the Northern Territories, the boundaries of which recognised local geography or social organisation only to the extent of following the line of a river, the Black Volta, along part of its southern border. By such drawing of lines on maps, some 30,000 square miles of hills and savannah were transformed into an administrative unit.