Imagined martial communities: recruiting for the military and police in colonial Ghana, 1860–1960

Abstract

The current debate on ethnicity in northern Ghana provides relatively little insight into the mental maps of the people, largely non-literate, who inhabited that region in the mid- and late nineteenth century. Contemporary constructs by local intellectuals, and stories of origin, may say more about current contentions than about once-perceived notions of identity (Lentz, 1994a,b). Ideas of identity vary and most societies have a variety of ‘imagined communities’, often with changing, competing and overlapping loyalties. In northern Ghana the ethnic picture is confused not only by the diversity of peoples but by our lack of knowledge of how groups identified themselves in the past, how different such identities were from the way in which people now identify themselves, by the superimposition upon them by European outsiders of ‘tribal’ identities, and the changes brought about by colonialism and modernity.