Violence, Hierarchy, and Personal Status in Nineteenth Century West Africa

The chapter provides an historical reading of violence in connection with the exercise of political power in south-west Ghana between the final years of the eighteenth and early twentieth century, contributing fresh evidence to a longstanding debate about some fundamental features of social hierarchy and personal status in pre-colonial West Africa. The study addresses issues like the judicial practices, the discretionality by the powerful in disposing of the persons and lives of subjects, and highly problematic areas like ritual and funeral killings and human sacrifice, and the recruitment of their victims. These practices underwent constant reshaping during the period under consideration, due to the effects of dramatic economic, political and cultural/religious changes, which radically redefined some fundamental features of the system of power and the hierarchy of personal dependency, and their perception by local society.