‘No Palaver about 1 or 2 Villages with 10 or 20 inhabitants’: Precolonial Borders and the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire Frontier (Seventeenth-Twentieth century)

A fair number of contemporary African borders have complex histories that go beyond European colonial enterprise. The delimitation of colonial borders mwas often deeply influenced by dynamics which developed on the spot and which pertained to aspects of inter-African relations that went back in time and that made these borders well recognizable and recognized by the people they were meant to separate. The Ghana/Côte d’Ivoire frontier is often portrayed as a textbook example of the impact of European colonial enterprise, which split up areas and communities with long histories of interconnection and sometime unity. In conventional historical reconstruction, the creation of this boundary takes the form of a linear process, mirroring the progress of European powers in the interior of West Africa and the more general logic informing the ‘Scramble’. The process is invariably presented as having been set in motion by European powers as a function of their positions and interests in the region. Holding all the cards, they are the primary actors throughout the story, and lead it to its foreseeable conclusions. Africans, however, were not secondary actors and cannot be dismissed as bit players in a plot which they did not themselves conceive. The article focuses on the outset of the delimitation process in the southernmost section of the border region, in the early 1880s. This region was occupied by two competing African polities, Nzema to the east and Sanwi to the west. The positions and claims of the English, the French and very briefly the Dutch in establishing the boundary between their respective colonial interests overlapped and coincided with those of other local actors, establishing a direct continuity with the hegemonic disputes that had been taking place in the region for at least a couple of centuries, well before the Europeans came to the forefront of local politics. While in the early 1880s the competition between Europeans still in many ways depended on the logic of competition between the African powers and interests closest to the Atlantic coast, toward the end of the decade – during the sudden and full manifestation of the Scramble at the continental level – the reasons and strategies of European actors clearly acquired their own substantial autonomy through the expansion of the chessboard of confrontation. Nonetheless, the success of the agreement remained linked to achieving a realistic compromise between the opposing demands of local African parties: Nzema and Sanwi ruling groups in the first place.