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tenure arrangements had functioned before the British first curtailed and
later destroyed the power of the Asantehene and the Asanteman Council, 3
he had to make informed guessesastothechanges thathadoccurred since
the institution of colonial rule. And while the establishment of British
control over Asante, beginning with Maclean's treaty with the Asantehene
in 1831, through Garnett Wolseley's 1874 campaign which resulted in the
destruction of Kumasi and the signing of the Treaty of Fomena, to the
deposition ofthe Asantehene Prempeh I in 1896,4 was a long drawn-out
process, this was even more the case for the territories of the Gold Coast
colony. As Mensah Sarbah correctly asserted: 'British sovereignty over the
Gold Coast territories was gradually acquired, and at times by such gradual,
slow and imperceptible steps that even now [Sarbah was writing in 1906]
many questions of public importance are not free from doubt and
difficulty' (Sarbah 1968: 92). Although it is true thatthe Gold Coast Forts
and Settlements (including Lagos!) were separated from Sierra Leone and
'erected into' a Colony by Letters Patent as late as 24 July 1874, it is equally
true that when, by the Bond of 1844, the Gold Coast chiefs had
acknowledged the power and jurisdiction of the British Crown, whether
by usage or usurpation, rights of jurisdiction had been acquired since the
1820s (cf. Kimble 1963: 302 and 194-95 resp.).
We shall argue that the destruction of the sovereignty of the
Mfantse states and the Asante kingdom and, with that, the undermining
of chiefly power, caused the most radical change in land tenure relations
rather than the development of the permanent cultivation of cash crops,
specifically of cocoa, as numerous authors have stated. It would therefore
be of great interest to have an account of the gradual curtailment of chiefly
rule and of the effects of this process on land tenure arrangements. As it is,
however, we do not have even the beginnings of such an historical analysis,
while the earliest source materials on Gold Coast customary land law (cf.
Sarbah 1897) date only from the last decade ofthe 19th century and do not
go back earlier than 1844, i.e. before the official establishment of British
jurisdiction and power over the Gold Coast territories. Hence, any attempt
to assess the nature and extent ofthese changes has to be content with some
kind of ideal-typical reconstruction ofland tenure relations as these might
have obtained in pre-colonial times. A comparison with Akan land tenure
arrangements as they now apply might help our understanding of why so
much of the customary system still seems to function and what interests are
thereby served.
As we have pointed out, such a reconstruction is hazardous because
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