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THE FIELDWORK AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION
My interest in landtenure and access to land in Southern Ghana and all
the inter -connected prob lems is not an arbitrary matter but is linked to my
earlier research. I have always been deeply concerned with the plight of
fishermen and peasants, small-scale entrepreneurs, both men and women,
and the question of how they managed to subsist and the historical, political
and socio-economic processes that played a role in their way of life.
My research into the political economy of peasant farming started
in 1974 in the following manner. When discussing how to improve their
individual incomes as well as their collective welfare, the elders of Abura
Dunkwa* said that lack ofland was not likely to be a problem. On the whole
there was plenty ofland, although it was not always in the near proximity.
Although I and my colleagues at the Centre for Development Studies at
Cape Coast had for many years maintained that lack of wage labour would
be a bottleneck in developing peasant agriculture, the elders assured me
repeatedly that they would gladly make time available to clear new land and
to plant a new cash crop. However, they wanted me to advise them as to
which crop that they had not already tried would be most profitable.
I was never certain whether they really expected me to answer that
question. In particular, I was aware that they were referring sarcastically
to tobacco - the last crop that they had 'tried' and has mostly given up
because of the ridiculously low (non-equivalent) prices paid by the Tobacco
Development Board. In 1973 this had become quite a scandal.
But however pertinent my questions regarding the estimated area
of available land, its location and quality, and also about the number of
man- days that they would be able to devote to cultivating an additional
crop, the answers were never satisfactory.
This marked the start of my research. In 1974, with the aid of
Samuel Kwegyir, research assistant at the Centre and son of the Okyeame
(chieflinguist) of the Abura-Dunkwa Odikro, and armed with a list of all
Abura-Dunkwa families, including the heads of all matrilineal divisions,
that had been provided by the 'ebusua clerk', I started to visit all heads of
landowning Dunkwa families, both male and female. My questions
concerned the location of their lands, their approximate areas, and the
* Abura Dunkwa is a small rural town of 4000-5000 inhabitants in the
Central Region.
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