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IV
AKAN LAND TENURE ARRANGEMENTS:
AN OUTLINE
1. All Views of Akan Land Tenure are Mediated through the Conditions
of Colonialism and the Legal Concepts of English Common Law
When writing about Akan land tenure it is impossible to give a
straightforward account of customary rules concerning the control and
allocation, usufruct and alienation, custody and administration of land
and ofthe conditions under which these apply. All major accounts of Akan
land tenure date from colonial or post-colonial times and, with few
exceptions, have been written by legal experts trained in English common
law. This holds for some of the early members of the new Ghanaian elite,
now revered as heroes of Akan culture and repositories of traditional law,
such as John Mensah Sarbah (1897)1 and J.B. Danquah (1928); it also
holds for more recent attempts at scientific reconstruction of customary
land law as a coherent pattern, notably those by Ollennu (1962) and Bentsi­
Enchill (1964). Apart from a brief but highly effective chapter on Akim
Abuakwaland sales by Polly Hill (1963: Ch.V) and a concise but very incisive
essay by Gordon Woodman (1976), no other sources attempt an empirical
study of the role of customary law as only one, and possibly not a very
decisive, component of social and economic practice. Without exception,
all other authors have been preoccupied with the need to codify, categorize
and systematize the black -letter rules of law. 2This also holds for Rattray,
. one-time government anthropologist, whose first sketch of Ashanti land
tenure (1923, Ch.XXI) was an endorsement of the 1912 Belfield Report
which, on the whole, he followed in its application of common law
terminology and only criticized for 'sins of omission' (Ibidem: 213). To this
we hasten to add that Rattray's empirical materials and his presentation
thereof remain of great value and that in his second account of customary
land law (1929: Ch.xXXIII) he re-examined the issue in the light of new
data, thereby, as he himself puts it, 'rolling back some of the fog which
seemed persistently to obscure the question' (Ibidem: 340).
But even where the anthropologist Rattray based himself on indisputable
facts free of common law interpretations, he could only record
practices with regard to ownership and alienation ofland as they occurred
in a colonially-controlled Ashanti. In other words, to understand how land
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