‘The Lion of Dagbon’ is a praise-title of the paramount chiefs, the Ya-Nas, of the Dagomba people in northern Ghana. This study is concerned with the political history of the Dagomba kingdom, notably during the last seventy years when the kingdom has been subordinated to governments, successively colonial and national, in Accra and Tamale. Its purpose is to examine the policies which the overlords of Dagomba have adopted in order to preserve, exploit, and assimilate the pre-colonial structure of authority and also to consider changes in local politics which have come about, at least partly, through the action of these external authorities. The concluding chapters deal with the origins and character of a major dispute within the kingdom, the conflict which has come to be known in Ghanaian politics as ‘the Yendi skin dispute’.

My original interest in northern Ghanaian politics arose from earlier work on central-local relations in the Ivory Coast. It seemed to me, from fieldwork in the Ivory Coast, that relations between the national capital and the outlying, underdeveloped districts of the north involved a distinctive pattern of patronage-clientage and a distinctive set of attitudes towards government. After reading other studies (notably that by Dunn and Robertson in this series), I now regard the narrowness of patronage-clientage and the syndrome of dominance-cum-ingratiation to be found in the northern Ivory Coast as extreme forms of general phenomena rather than as regional peculiarities.

They are, nonetheless, interesting and I felt that it would be useful to explore a comparable case in northern Ghana. In the event, it was impossible to find a situation which was economically and geographically exactly comparable.