This chapter is concerned with the structure and dynamics of Dagomba politics in the pre-colonial age. As an exercise in reconstructing ‘traditional’ society, it is liable to produce an excessively rigid and formalised model, since it is so hard to distinguish in retrospect between what was important and what was trivial and flexible. Further, although the intervening period of colonial rule did bring about a great increase in foreigners’ knowledge of pre-colonial government, the ‘conservationism’ practised by some administrators led to a certain fossilisation of ‘traditional’ politics, to a mummification of the body politic in a wrapping of ethnography. The ‘indirect rulers’ sometimes killed the thing they loved: that is, they destroyed the essential dynamics of ‘archaic’ societies by heavily administered efforts to preserve formal institutions and procedures. For, as Peter Lloyd writes, ‘In the colonial territory and the modern independent state it is often the rituals and ceremonies which have survived, while the traditional decision-making processes have been irrevocably changed.’

In depicting Dagomba political organisation we are immediately involved in conceptual problems which are familiar to political anthropologists. Among these problems are the definition and isolation of ‘the political sphere’ and the characterisation of the traditional state.