Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier

PAUL NUGENT is Professor of Comparative African History (History and Centre of African Studies) at the University of Edinburgh.

• Introduction - the lie of the borderlands. Part I Drawing the lines - the construction of the Togoland border; tar-baby imperialism - the making & shaping of the Togoland frontier; cocoa culture - social interaction & land litigation along the Togoland frontier; display & dissimulation - the customs prevention service & smugglers along the Togoland frontier, 1920-39. Part II Filling spaces - the politics of identity along the Togoland frontier: us & them - Christianity, migrancy & chieftaincy in the remaking of identities; "imperialism is not necessarily a bad thing" - Togoland reunification, Ewe unification & Gold Coast imperialism, 1921-57. Part III Inscribing spaces - the political economy of the Ghana-Togo border since independence: the cessation of secession - the political paradox of the Ghana-Togo border; "strangers can never see all corners of the town" - land, contraband & the boundary since independence.

This study...is warmly recommended and should be of particular interest to those concerned with the ins and outs of imaginary or putative nationalisms in Africa. From a comparative perspective, it would be very interesting to see to what extent Nugent's four main conclusions - that boundary lines drawn by the various colonial powers were never simply arbitrary, that those boundary lines created local sets of vested interests favouring the status quo, that the division of a putative ethnic group (the Ewe) was not sufficient to override the forces conspiring towards maintenance of the border and, finally, that contra a particularly well-established orthodoxy, Ewe border communities in both countries have neither been divorced from the state, nor especially resistant to it - have wider currency beyond the Ghana-Togo context.