See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/329524167

Jack Goody: Early Fieldwork and the Passing of an Era of

Cambridge Anthropology in Northern Ghana

Article · December 2018

DOI: 10.1353/ghs.2018.0001

CITATIONS READS

0 230

1 author:

Isidore Lobnibe
Western Oregon University
13 PUBLICATIONS   21 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

History of Anthropology View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Isidore Lobnibe on 13 December 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

JACK GOODY
Early Fieldwork and the Passing of an Era of
Cambridge Anthropology in Northern Ghana

ISIDORE LOBNIBE

ABSTRACT: This paper presents, with some contextualization, excerpts of an

extended interview conducted with the late professor Jack Goody in 2006 at
his academic base of St. John’s College, Cambridge University. The interview
serves as a token memorial to his contributions to African anthropology and
Ghana Studies. Information presented herein highlights Goody’s early expe-
riences in the Gold Coast, and also offers a glimpse into the broader ethno-
graphic context under which he worked in the 1950s and 1960s in what are the
present-day Upper West and Northern Regions of Ghana.

KEYWORDS: Birifor, early fieldwork, Jack Goody, Lawra District, Northern

Ghana

Introduction
One early morning in the spring of 2006, I arrived at St.  John’s Col-
lege, Cambridge University, to visit a Fellow of the college with whom I
had exchanged emails for several months concerning a possible inter-
view. E. K. Takyi and Francis Kemausuor, two Ghanaian Cambridge Uni-
versity students, accompanied me. I was completing graduate studies in

Isidore Lobnibe (lobnibei@wou.edu) is an associate professor of social cultural anthro-

pology at Western Oregon University, specializing in West Africa. His major research
interests are social organization, West African political economy (Ghana and Burkina
Faso), the household and peasant economy, labor migration, historiography, and the
history of anthropology.

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 21 3

ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168
© 2018 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
4 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

Figure 1. Jack Goody in his office at St. John’s College (Photo by Francis Kemausuor).

anthropology, and I was very eager to meet the renowned anthropologist

who had pioneered fieldwork in the 1950s in my home region of what is
now the Upper West of Ghana. Because we were meeting for the first time,
I did not know what to expect from my host; nor was my host aware that
he was going to receive two other visitors. As we stepped into his sprawling
office, he beckoned to us: “Take a seat!” (See Figure 1.)
No sooner had we taken our seats than he began speaking the major
local language of his former fieldwork site in northwestern Ghana. It soon
occurred to me that as an astute ethnographer, our host spoke the North-
ern Ghanaian language as a diagnostic event with which to determine who
among his three visitors was from Northern Ghana. When the other two
students did not immediately respond, he paused and asked which part of
Ghana they hailed from. He then turned and greeted me, speaking fluent
Dagara, in a rather jovial manner.
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 5

A distinguishing feature of early British social anthropology was its in-

tense and extended fieldwork tradition, which allowed the field researcher
ample time to learn the language and be exposed to the daily life of the
community as well as to bond with informants. What was strikingly unique
about my host was the display of his very good command of the local lan-
guage of his former field site even after several decades of not visiting there.
In fact, the comfortable manner with which he alternated between differ-
ent dialects of the two settlements in which he conducted research, and
even asked about certain individuals and their family members he’d known
several decades ago, further testified to the intense bond and friendship he
had formed with members of the community he studied.
The above description represents my first experience of meeting and
interacting with the venerable anthropologist emeritus Professor Sir Jack
Goody (1919–2015), who passed away nearly three years ago as of this
writing. Until his death on 16 July 2015, the distinguished British social
anthropologist and pioneer ethnographer of northwestern Ghana was
perhaps the sole remaining influential colonial-era Africanist whose schol-
arly contributions helped place the continent on the world ethnographic
map. Keith Hart (1985), for one, writes that when social anthropology
was at its height during the interwar period and its immediate aftermath,
Evans-­Pritchard and Meyer Fortes were the discipline’s “standard bearers.”
Evans-­Pritchard, he notes, “wrote over a broader front and with more ex-
plicit concern with intellectual history,” but Fortes’s work on the Tallensi
represented “the supreme synthesis of theory and description of British
Social Anthropology” (Hart, 1985, p. 245).
Commenting on the influence of both Evans-Pritchard and Meyer
Fortes in helping to define and shape his field of interests and fieldwork in
West Africa, Goody (1991) himself notes:
Over six years of war had left their mark: life in a prison camp led me to
wonder how people got on or came into conflict with one another; life in
the army encouraged an interest in the military side of the “other cultures.”
Evans-Pritchard’s clinical analysis of feud in his lectures in Cambridge in
1946–47 helped to place those years of experience in a wider context, and
the threat of nuclear warfare continues to keep “conflict studies” in the cen-
ter of one’s vision. If Marx drew my attention to modes of production, the
“New Criticism” and logical positivism to modes of communication and of
thought, so did the times lead me to consider mode of destruction. (p. 5)

If Jack Goody’s interest in anthropology as stated above was in some

measure grounded in his wartime experiences and shaped in lectures de-
livered by Evans-Pritchard in Cambridge, it was at Oxford University that
6 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

Fortes directed him to West Africa for fieldwork. In an Annual Review of

Anthropology article, Goody attributes his decision to travel to what is
present-­day Northern Ghana in part to his friendly relations with Joe
­Reindorf, a fellow Cambridge student from the Gold Coast, and in part to
the prompting of Meyer Fortes:

Fortes directed my attention to the LoDagaa partly because he had carried

out research among the “patrilineal” Tallensi and the “matrilineal” Ashanti
and was interested in those societies of which the Yako of Nigeria[,] stud-
ied by Daryll Forde, was the paradigmatic case, in which named unilineal
descent groups of patrilineal and matrilineal kind existed side by side . . . ;
these were the LoDagaa (or Lobi as the British then called them, or the
Dagari or Dagara as they were known to the French and now generally to
themselves), a study of whom had been listed as a priority in Raymond
Firth’s report to the Colonial Social Science Research Council. (1991, p. 5)

From the 1950s, Jack Goody joined intellectual forces with Fortes,
who had moved to Cambridge to build the Department of Anthropology
(Drucker-­Brown, 1989; Hann, 2017; Hart, 1985), in producing some of
the major and important ethnographic monographs in social anthropol-
ogy. Their stimulating empirical accounts also inspired, if not dominated,
debates on kinship and descent theories, ritual and ancestor veneration,
the cult of the dead, property inheritance, and mortuary practices, to
mention but a few (see Fortes, 1945, 1949; Goody, 1956, 1962). At the
institutional level, Goody went on to succeed Fortes as the William Wyse
Professor of Social Anthropology in Cambridge from 1973 to 1978 (Hann,
2017). Hence, with Northern Ghana as their base, the so-called “structural-­
functional Cambridge school of Fortes and Goody” (Hart, 1985, p.  243)
established themselves as the two “big men of the tribe” of African anthro-
pology (cf. Hann, 2017). Keith Hart (1985) suggests that if West African
ethnography came to occupy such a prominent place in social anthropology
in the postwar era, it is thanks largely to the seminal works on the Tall-
ensi and LoDagaa by Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody, respectively, who, in
his words, “have set theoretical and empirical standards which have rarely
been matched anywhere” (p. 243).
This essay presents, with some contextualization, excerpts of an ex-
tended interview I conducted with the late Jack Goody at his academic base
of St. John’s College, Cambridge University. The interview serves as a token
memorial to his contributions to African anthropology and Ghana Studies.
Information presented herein highlights Goody’s early experiences in the
Gold Coast, and also offers a glimpse into the broader political and social
context under which he worked in the 1950s and 1960s. Much has been
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 7

written about the intellectual genealogy and theoretical orientations that

underpinned Jack Goody’s long and prolific career (see Drucker-Brown,
1989; Goody, 1991, 1995; Hann, 2017; Hart, 1985, 2011, 2015). The aim
here is not to offer a comprehensive assessment of his scholarship; rather,
I elicited his personal reflections on questions I posed to him in the afore-
mentioned interview covering a wide range of themes. Among other ques-
tions, I asked why he chose the Gold Coast as a field site, and to what extent
his anthropological research and experience in what is now the Upper West
Region of Ghana (and Gonja in the Northern Region) were shaped and af-
fected by the colonial institutional framework of the 1950s. Furthermore,
I was interested in the nature of his interactions with some British-trained
Ghanaian intellectuals with whom he shared institutional affiliations in
Oxbridge.
The excerpts are organized under six major themes, namely, (1)  Jack
Goody’s early years in Lawra; (2) his connections with Oxbridge intellec-
tuals from Ghana; (3)  his role as participant-observer; (4)  his reactions
to critiques of his scholarship; (5)  his engagement in the African Stud-
ies Institute’s Islamic project; and, finally, (6)  his interactions with local
collaborators.
Jack Goody was born 27 July 1919 in London to middle-class English
parents. He attended St. Albans school and went on to enroll in Cambridge
University in 1938. At Cambridge, he intended to study English literature,
but the outbreak of the Second World War disrupted his undergraduate
years (Hann, 2017; Hart, 1985, 2011). During the war, he not only saw ac-
tion but was captured, and he spent six years in captivity in rural Italy and
North Africa. As Hart (1985, 2011); (Hann, 2017); and Goody himself (see
interview following) note, the war experience had a profound impression
on him and redirected his interests to other cultures besides his own. In
1946, he returned to Cambridge to complete his studies but shifted to an-
thropology. After a brief stint spent working for the colonial social science
research office and in adult education following Cambridge, he returned to
Oxford University for advanced studies in anthropology under the super-
vision of Meyer Fortes.

Early Years of Fieldwork in Lawra District

When Jack Goody arrived in Lawra District for fieldwork, first, as directed
by his academic teacher Meyer Fortes, he went in search of the Lobi. In the
colonial official representations, the Lobi were an exemplar of the primi-
tive and wild tribes of the Northern Territories whose social organization
needed to be understood for ease of containment. Finding the Lobi, however,
8 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

proved somewhat elusive because of the relative or directional manner in

which people generally defined themselves. In his first weeks in the field, the
young anthropologist befriended Kunyamwinibini, one of the sons of the
Lawra Naa, the colonial paramount chief of Lawra. Kunyamwinibini directed
Goody to Birifor, a village to the west of Lawra with which he fell in love,
as he put it. But while immersing himself in village life, he never lost sight
of making sense of the complex social landscape within which the so-called
Lobi and other congeries were situated. This initial interest and recurring
questions over property inheritance, raised first by his local cook, and later
during the funeral rites of the Birifor village chief, came to define the broad
contours of the themes that were to result in his first two monographs.
The Birifor Naa had died in February 1950, not long before Goody’s ar-
rival in the village. As dispute over his succession loomed among his nu-
merous sons, Goody witnessed firsthand the unfolding intrafamily conflict
and the web of palace intrigues. S. W. D. K Gandah, one of the sons of the
late village chief who became a longtime friend and collaborator of Jack
Goody, later clarified the source of the conflict in his autobiography titled
The Silent Rebel: “The funeral rites should, according to tradition, have
taken place a year later. But Nana [one of his brothers] who was eager to
become the chief of the village, wanted the funeral rites to be performed
much earlier, and against all traditional rules” (2004, p. 171; see also Lentz,
2008, 2009, 2012).
In what follows, I, Isidore Lobnibe (IL), began my conversation with
Professor Jack Goody (JG) by asking him about his experience as a field-
worker in the 1950s. What was daily village life like, and was it easy to
move around in the North of Ghana? Under what conditions did he operate
in the last decade of the colonial administration? Moreover, since he had
written several times about his choice of the Gold Coast as being partly
influenced by Joe Reindorf, what type of relations did he maintain with
his friend and other Oxbridge intellectuals from the Gold Coast who were
active in the anticolonial struggle and with whom he shared a common
professor in Meyer Fortes?
JG: Joe Reindorf was my friend. I knew him in Cambridge when he was
studying to be a lawyer, but he was also a historian; he had done history first.
And of course his uncle Carl Reindorf wrote the history of Ghana earlier on
and they came from Accra. He made me interested in the country. In any
case, the country was becoming independent, so it was interesting for that
reason—that Ghana was the first country in Africa to become independent.

IL: Was it easy to move around in the North, given the colonial framework
at the time?
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 9

JG: There were not many cars at all. I did not have a car, but there were
some cars at the university (at Legon). Otherwise, you rode on government
transport or mummy lorries whenever they came by. You got around with
those all right. . . . When I was there politics was all over the place. There was
the Northern People’s Party (NPP) and Nkrumah’s party, the Convention
People’s party (CPP), and so on. And politics came and very much divided
houses. The chief’s house at Birifor was completely divided between the
NPP and the CPP. My friend Kumbuno Gandah, whose biography I pub-
lished called the Silent Rebel, took to the NPP in Tugu. Later he thought he
had to come to work here in England. He worked here and retired here. He
was NPP and was very much at odds with his brother Nonatuo, who [later
became chief following the father’s death and] was CPP, and a number of
others. Very often houses were split like that. I don’t know how it was in
Nandom, but many of the houses were split, one side going one way or the
other. Politics came in quite strongly and divided houses. At the time I ar-
rived at Lawra, there was a lot of political activity.

IL: What about your interactions with the colonial administrators?

JG: I did not really have much to do with them. The administrator when I
was there was called Dyerball. And some relatives of his had written quite
interesting accounts of the Chinese in Hong Kong. So he knew what I was
doing and he was interested in history a bit. So he was quite helpful, but I
did not meet him much except in relation to the first elections [1951 na-
tional elections], because he was a senior administrator and was in charge
of conducting the elections. I got to know him a bit when I went out as a
returning election officer, I guess.

IL: So you were a returning election officer?

JG: Yes. I think so. It was a temporary thing. I was doing it for a few days. I
was right into the bush. Yes, it was a temporary thing.

IL: How old were you when you started fieldwork in Ghana?

JG: When I had been to the war . . . [pause]. And I had six years of war. . . . I
was around 27 years old.

IL: Would you say your decision to do anthropology was shaped by the war
and by your experiences there?

JG: Yes, I think that made me much more aware of what was going on in
various parts of the world. In a sense, I wanted to see more of the different
parts of the world. Otherwise, I should have been studying English litera-
ture or something like that. But I wanted to see other parts of the world
because of the war; and [I] also got to know what was going on.
10 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

With Gold Coast Oxbridge Intellectuals

By 1950, Joe Reindorf had returned home to the Gold Coast and was al-
ready working at the Kumasi-based law firm of his brother-in-law, Victor
Owusu. It appears that the relative proximity of Kumasi to Lawra District
of the Northern Territories made it possible for Goody to pay his friend a
few visits. It was during one of those visits to Kumasi that Joe Reindorf
invited Goody to sit in and take notes on his behalf in the famous Amadu
Baba case.1 Beyond his personal friendship, Goody either shared a similar
political orientation with Joe Reindorf, who went on to become the attor-
ney general under the Nkrumah CPP administration, or he simply gravi-
tated toward the ideology of the CPP because of his communist roots by
joining the CPP’s Birifor local branch as an astute participant-observer.
Like his friend, he saw himself as an agent of change in bringing about
reform in the colonial order and did not hesitate to serve as an election
officer in villages during the elections.
To further draw forth his reactions to the extent his circle of friends
was defined by political ideology, I asked Goody if he knew Kofi A. Busia,
who was a staunch opponent of Nkrumah, either back at Oxford or when
he worked in Ghana.
JG: Oh, yes! I knew Busia quite well because Busia was a student in Oxford
of Meyer Fortes. The book he wrote on Ashanti was done under him as his
PhD thesis. And when I went to Ghana, he was head of the sociology depart-
ment and teaching at Achimota. So I knew him then. Yes, I knew him when
I went down to Legon.

IL: In your article in the Annual Review of Anthropology, you mentioned that
you were not going out to see people . . . ?

JG: No! I was going to see more of the world and other things, but it made
a little difference that I knew somebody from the area and somebody who
told me about Ghana. Joe went to work in Kumasi, with his brother-in-
law, Victor Owusu . . . , who was NLM [National Liberation Movement] of
course; they were NLM. I visited him in Kumasi when I went there, but I
did not go down there often. As I said, I did not have a car; the people I was
working with in Oxford said, you must get to know the people in space and
time and know the feelings of those I was working with, and that if I had a

1.  Alhadji Amadu Baba was the Sarkin Zongo, a Muslim religious leader in Kumasi
Zongo who was accused of subversive activities during the Nkrumah CPP government.
He was brought before the Sarkodie Commission, tried, and eventually expelled from
Ghana.
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 11

car, I was going to be going here and there. Joe did not have a car either. The
Birifor Naa had a kind of a lorry and it was paid for by the people in Kumasi
in the Kukpenibie shrine.2 But that came after I got there. I don’t think
there was anything local at all.

IL: And I heard you also worked on the Amadu Baba case?

JG: I went down to Kumasi because my friend Joe Reindorf was acting for
Victor Owusu. And I just went in to visit. I think Joe Reindorf took me in
Victor Owusu’s car to keep notes and I had no right to be there, but he took
me to the court and I sat down. I was staying with Joe at the time and he
was with the other lawyer, the other lawyer . . .

IL: Do you mean Victor Owusu?

JG: No, the other lawyer whose son is at Harvard. Joe Appiah was his name.
He obviously knew Joe well. I think his son’s name is Anthony Appiah.

IL: So you did not meet Busia at Oxford?

JG: No, I did not meet him at Oxford. He had gone back to Ghana at the
time. I think he became a district officer for a while. He worked in govern-
ment before coming to the university.

IL: What about Kyerematen?

JG: Alex Kyerematen . . . I knew him very well. He was also Fortes’s student,
yes. I think he also offered a PhD at Oxford. I knew him in Kumasi. I must
have stayed there with him. I remember visiting him at the zoo in the mid-
dle of that park in Kumasi. He founded the zoo, didn’t he? I certainly went
to see him.

As Participant-Observer
The scope of Goody’s early anthropological interests and approach to field-
work suggests that he perhaps was more innovative, if not revolutionary,
as a result of the structural-functionalist tradition in which he was trained
during the 1950s. To be sure, his first monograph, The Social Organisation of
the LoWiili (1956), exemplified social anthropology’s disciplinary concerns
at the time. The scope and breadth of his better-known work Death, Prop-
erty and the Ancestors (1962) represent the anthropological shift from field-
work to history (Hart, 1985, p. 254). In this work, as Hart (2011) notes,
Goody demonstrates “that the key to variations in kinship organization

2.  For more on this shrine, see Allman and Parker (2005); and Lentz (2012).
12 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

lay in the transmission of property, the material link between generations

constituted by pattern of inheritance and manifested in religious obser-
vances such as the ancestor cult” (p. 5). Regarding the scope of fieldwork,
he broadened his interests much earlier on to include Islam, and limited
writing and other productive systems. I asked him to briefly outline the
trajectory and scope of his fieldwork.

JG: I wrote the Social Organisation of the LoWiili (1956) that was my thesis
at Oxford, but I went straight back and then I worked at Tom and Ko in the
Nandom area because I wanted something entirely different. Then I came
back and wrote the Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962). I then went
to do fieldwork in Gonja in 1956, I think. That was when I went to work in
Buipe. I had seen Gonja when I was coming up in the government lorry and
stayed in Bole when I was going up to Wa. It seemed to me an interesting
town. I was interested in the history of that area, and especially in Islam . . .
and its impact on that area. So the next time I went to work in Buipe and
around there. My wife at that time, Esther Goody, was interested in matri-
lineal people, so we were looking for some people down there called the
Lambo [sic] . . . near Buipe and she went to work with them, but it was too
difficult getting in and out, so we stayed in Buipe and later on she worked in
Busunu on the road near Damongo.

IL: So after 1956, you did not go back to Nandom?

JG: I went, but I worked farther down south. I did get back for short visits
but not long ones. I went there because when I was in Gonja, I had a lor-
ry—a Jeep—which I got from the Institute of African Studies at Legon. I
had to pay for it of course, but I had one. So when I was at Bole, I could travel
up to Wa and up to Nandom.

IL: What would you say is the difference between Tom and Birifor? This is
the interesting aspect you wrote about, and people have taken issue with
you.

JG: Well, in Birifor, be be dire Gban gbaan (they did not inherit matrilineally)
at all. They had matrilineal clans like Some and Meda, but they did not pass
down inheritance in that way. And I don’t think to this day, whether Gan-
dah stopped it when he became chief in the Birifor area or not, I can’t tell.
But when I got there to the area, I went to where they inherited through
the matrilineal line, movable property, cows and other things. So I went
out to the Nandom area because that was where somebody who worked for
me as a steward, Timbome, came from, and his uncle was headman, called
Nibe. There they had matrilineal inheritance, and my steward was not ready
to work for his father because his entire father’s wealth was going to his
sister’s son. So I went up there because of this, but they did not do that in
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 13

Birifor. They had the Some clan, but everything went down from father to
son.

IL: A lot of people say you labeled the people LoDagaa?

JG: Yes, of course! When I first went to Lawra, I first met Kunyaminibini
[Abeiyafaa Karbo], who later became the MP. He was son of the Lawra Naa,
and I asked him that I wanted to study the Lobi, and that was what I was
coming for. So when I went there, first of all, they said the Lobi lived at
the other side [of the Black Volta], and they were thinking of the people of
Gaoua [in today’s Burkina Faso]. So I asked them what they called them-
selves; they said they called themselves Dagati at the time. At that time,
Dagati were the people in Jirapa. They were the proper Dagati. They inher-
ited everything from the father’s line. Depending on where you were, every-
body said the Lobi lived at this place or that way. So I started calling them
LoDagaa because of this. But it wasn’t any fixed name, but one which sought
to show how people define their custom[s] in different circumstances. They
had two names which they used in different circumstances. Yes, they said,
I am a Dagaa in one context, but when they talked about matrilineal inher-
itance, they would say yes, I am Lo, which is the Lo custom. In Birifor, you
had the Some and Da clans, but there was no matrilineal inheritance. It was
all patrilineal like the Dagati people of Jirapa. There were some differences
with regard to what women could inherit, but [with] other forms of prop-
erty it was patrilineal.

IL: Would you say the LoDagaa whom you studied have changed?

JG: Yes. They have actually changed a lot! I have not been there for some
years. They were just starting a school when I was first there, which had
important implications. After all, people are now coming to Europe—you
guys. The LoDagaa, when I was there, were only becoming teachers. There
was only one university in the south. Teaching was a stepping-stone and
some people later went on to the university; some were also becoming army
officers and politicians. There was great differentiation taking place. But
when I first went there, a school had just started in Birifor; there was one in
Lawra, and Kum was one of those pupils. There were not many people who
had been to school.

IL: Was Kumbonoh (Kum) Gandah in Lawra and that was where you used
to meet?

JG: No! When I came there, he was in fact working; I think he was in Tumu.
He had given up teaching because he could not get on with the head teacher.
He had become a trader and used the lorry, which had been paid for by the
people in the Kukpenibie shrine near Kumasi. They gave the lorry to his
father, and they used the lorry to transport beer up north. I am sure he was
14 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

in Tumu at that time, but he used to come down, and that’s how I met him.
He came down from Tumu to his father’s funeral. But I had a brother of his
who was working for me called Kpaari. He had not been to school. So I knew
Kum through Kpaari, through his brother.

IL: Was Kpaari working for you as a translator?

JG: Yes, and as a companion and showing me around, taking me across the
river into French country.

IL: It means you attended a lot of funerals and bagr [clan-based secret rit-
ual] festivals?

JG: Yes, they were easy to attend, and people were very pleased you came.
They were interesting for me because so much was happening at the fu-
neral. I was interested in the chief’s funeral—Gandah’s funeral that we were
talking about—because all aspects of his life were reenacted. So everything
he did—there was a cow for hunting that was killed and a cow for me as
guest, the chickens he was rearing, and a cow for this, and a cow for that.
There were a lot of things, and people acted parts of his life. So you could see
what he had been doing during his life at his funeral. I was very interested
in that, and so I went to a lot of funerals around the place!

IL: Apart from the funerals and the bagr, what else?

JG: I went to everything. I went farming. I did everything. I went every-

where. The farming in Birifor was fairly close. There was so much weed, but
there was not much bush farming. It was all household farming. I went to
whatever was going on, really.

IL: How was the movement of people down south? You talked about the
Kukpenibie shrine.

JG: People were starting to go to Techiman. They went down to work in co-
coa farms and in the mines, and had been staying there for some time also
because of the need for farmland. They saw land around Techiman and they
went down there to farm. At Birifor, some went down as far as Techiman,
but others also went just near Wa to farm there because the area up there
was more populated, including the area you come from, but down in Gonja
and Wa, it was not populated really, and there was a lot of farmland. There
was a lot of farmland and when people saw it on the bus as they went down
south, they were attracted to go and settle there.

Reactions to Local Critics of His Scholarship

IL: Some local scholars have also been writing about their own societies,
and some have even criticized your description of the social organization
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 15

and the nomenclature for the people you studied. What is your reaction to
and opinion about the way they react to your works?

JG: I think it’s so important that should happen. It’s very important. But I
feel that some of them have a fixed agenda. Some of them want to make a
point that there was chiefship in that area for a long time. Well, there was
certainly what was called Naa. But I do know that, certainly in Birifor and
in Lawra, and in Nandom, the Naa as an administrative chief came later on,
and it came really with colonial rule. I don’t think that before that, you may
have had Naa; you have some type of Naa, or some rich people who might
have some authority over some area, but you did not have the idea of her-
itage chiefship. So I think some people want to push that back a long way.
And many people like Kum Gandah don’t like matrilineality.

IL: Why do you think it is so?

JG: Well, I know that the Catholic Church does not like matrilineal inher-
itance. So things have changed in that way. If you look back historically to
the 1950s and 1940s, there was some element of matrilineal inheritance
in the area [of the northwest]. Now matrilineal inheritance is not always
thought of as modern; it is outmoded and is not modern. Nkrumah had this
idea that he wanted to change it, but he could not do it among the Ashanti.
Because of this some people wanted to change that history a bit. I am a
true believer that you report what you actually see. Certainly things have
changed, and young lads like you [IL] have gone to school. You see, there
will be a time when some people would not believe that in Northern Ghana
people went around using the local hoe. They will think that people used the
machine. But for many years, people were using a local hoe. Now I believe
most people don’t! Few people do now, and it’s becoming important in part
of the North to have a tractor.
It is important to observe what is happening, how ownership of land is
changing with the changing means of production with a hoe, with the trac-
tor, and with more accessible water in dikes and pools. It is very important
to see what is changing with education and with politics. So all these are
important things to observe and why some other things are changing over
time. But when I was there, there was nobody from the North with a univer-
sity degree. It was schoolteachers like Kunyanwinibini or my friend Kum—
who were schoolteachers from that area but nobody from the university.
So if there were changes, it was school that was changing the people. As I
said, Kum, for example, came to London and lived here. These days people
are moving around much more in international ways, no longer confined to
Nandom or to Birifor like they were in the 1930s and 1940s. So people have
changed very much in that way through education.

IL: How did the Catholic Church fit in all of this?

16 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

JG: Well, the Catholic Church, as you know, was important in Nandom for
bringing in secondary schools. But it was not the only place there was a
school. The first school in Northwest was in Lawra, and it was headed by
a man called Henkel. When I went back there some time ago, the Catholic
Church was recruiting teachers to teach in the schools they established.

The African Studies Institute (Legon) Islamic Project

One little-known project that the founding director of the Institute of Afri-
can Studies at Legon, Thomas Hodgkin, initiated with support from other
colleagues such as Ivor Wilks and Jack Goody was the Islamic project.3 I
asked Goody to describe how the project started and if he knew where the
funding for it came from.

JG: I don’t really know where the funds came from. I think they came from
Ghana, from the university. It didn’t require many funds. They were funds
mobilized by the director of African Studies at the time who was a man
called Thomas Hodgkin, who wrote on politics, but he also wrote about
education. And Ivor Wilks got interested, I suppose because of Ashanti
and Ashanti history. He was interested in the history of the area and the
other written records, which were in Arabic. There were few of the Islamic
documents in Ashanti, and so he became interested in the documents in
that way. There were not many of them obviously from Ashanti, but he had
worked in the North before for the Department of Extramural Studies—
what was called PEA (People’s Education Association). I think he was one
of the tutors in the Gonja region and knew many of the people who were
moving around. The PEA was important, as you see from Kum Gandah’s
book. He [Kum] was taken up by the PEA, and he was already educated
and into politics by then. He went to summer schools in Winneba or Cape
Coast, and they had a lot of interest in tutors at the time and Ivor was one of
them. Because of his interest in history and the records were in Arabic, Ivor
employed somebody; they were not really expensive at all, a Ghanaian from
the North who worked at the Institute of African Studies (I have forgotten
his name), Alhaji something, who went around collecting records, libraries
from the North, from Salaga and other places. He brought these records and
he copied them and he deposited them in the Institute of African Studies. I
think the institute had somebody copy and xerox them. I have quite a num-
ber of those documents that came from there.

IL: And Nehemia Levtzion was involved?

3.  For more background and insights into the founding of the Institute of African Stud-
ies at the University of Ghana, see Allman (2013).
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 17

JG: Levtzion was involved, but he came later as a research worker. He

came from Israel; he was an Arabist. As an historian Israeli-Arabist, there
were not many places he could work so he came to West Africa. He came
and worked in the north. He died recently. He became head of the univer-
sity in Israel, I think, and became very important. He worked, and with
Ivor; he of course knew Arabic, whereas Ivor just knew a little Arabic.
Levtzion was an Arabic scholar and there was somebody else: a man called
Brad Martin, an American. He published a certain amount. He was also
in the institute and there was this Alhadji.  .  .  Levtzion worked in col-
laboration with Thomas Hodgkin, who was probably the critical person.
Thomas Hodgkin was the director of the institute, and he was the one
who was first interested in Islamic history and Islamic documents. And as
I said, they employed a Ghanaian malam who went around collecting the
documents. So that’s how they built up the collection, and then when it
became known, the Legon people worked with them. Levtzion came from
Israel, Martin from the USA. So they did important work in collecting
those documents.

IL: How did you as an anthropologist get interested in Islam?

JG: Well, when I went to Lawra, and Wa first of all, I was interested in the
Muslim penetration in that area, and in the Muslims’ coming to Wa. I then
became very interested in the penetration in the Gonja area, coming into
Bole and Kafaba and Salaga and in the movement of the Gonja into Maluwe,
coming down to Begho to northwest Ashanti. The very first article I wrote
was about the penetration of Islam into Northern Ghana. So I was always
interested in the contact of the area with Islam. So that’s how I really got
interested in Islam. I wanted to trace the very first penetration of Islam
into Northern Ghana, into that part of the savanna country right across the
desert and coming down there. There were quite a few Muslims of course
in Babile, where I was. There was somebody who had been in the army and
who had been converted to Islam and who recited to me the first bagr rec-
itation—Benima Dagarti was his name. He was from Birifor, but by that
time he had moved out and was living with the Muslims in Babile. He was
very helpful to me.

IL: Was he the one you referred to as a marginal person in the community?

JG: Yes, I think so. He was very marginal to people at that time because he
had been converted to Islam at the time when he was in the army. He saw
me making notes on the bagr performance one day and he said to me, “My
father taught me how to recite the bagr,” and he said, “Come, and I will teach
you.” I took a pencil and paper one day and went to him and in the next
twelve and ten days I was writing every day. I thought it was a short thing,
but it went on and on.
18 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

Local Collaborations
Beyond his personal friendships with individuals and families in Ghana,
Goody was also fond of collaborating with local scholars in writing local
Ghanaian history and other aspects of the culture. As early as the 1960s,
with J.  A.  Braimah he coedited Salaga: The Struggle for Power (1967). In
1977, he coauthored Siblings in Ghana with J. N. Addo; and with S. W. D. K.
Gandah, he later coedited Une récitation du Bagré (1980) and The Third Bagré
(2002). When necessary, he facilitated the completion and publication of
uncompleted works, as in the case of David Tait’s The Konkomba of North-
ern Ghana (1961), an ethnography on the Konkomba; and the posthumous
autobiography of his longtime friend S. W. D. K. Ghandah, The Silent Rebel
(2004).
Furthermore, I was interested to know if Goody regretted working in
Ghana. His answer was that he had no regrets at all. He did mention that
he wished he had been able to personally train some local Ghanaians at
Cambridge at that time. He pointed out that in the anticolonial fervor of
the early postindependence years, many African students tended to shy
away from the discipline of anthropology because of its perceived link with
colonialism. Some Ghanaian students whose fathers he knew very well and
visited anytime he was up north in Ghana attended Cambridge University,
but these students, namely, Aloysius Denkabe and Joseph Anafu among
others, chose different paths besides anthropology or sociology. He clar-
ified that the fact that he did not train local Ghanaian students did not
mean there was no longer a good ethnographic research presence in North-
ern Ghana by Cambridge scholars long after his own efforts and those of
Fortes before him.
By the 1960s, a new generation of students from Cambridge, some un-
der Jack Goody’s own supervision, notably Keith Hart, conducted fieldwork
among the Frafra and made very important contributions. The term “infor-
mal economy,” now in widespread use, was conceived and theorized during
that research; Esther Goody, with whom Goody collaborated, also produced
very important work on the Gonja. Susan Drucker-Brown made valuable
contributions on the Mamprussi. Jon Kirby and many others contributed
significant scholarly works in their own right to the discipline. None of
these scholars worked in northwest Ghana, to be sure, but Goody felt very
proud that each of the above-mentioned scholars continued in the intensive
fieldwork tradition of British social anthropology with Northern Ghana as
its base. Other students from Cambridge worked elsewhere in the country,
but it was more important that they chose Ghana, which was the epicenter
of rapid social change and the postworld of two anticolonial revolutions.
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 19

Epilogue
This essay has sought to place Jack Goody’s early fieldwork experience and
the type of social relations he forged with Ghana in a historical context.
What stood out from my interactions and impressions while meeting with
the late Jack Goody was his generosity and warmth, which I felt through-
out my visit. He not only arranged my accommodations and ensured that
I felt comfortable, but on the third day, he invited me to continue our con-
versation at his home and insisted that I bring the other Ghanaian stu-
dents. E. K. Takyi accompanied me to his house. After further conversation
and an exchange of gifts, we ended up in a nearby restaurant. As we left the
restaurant, I thanked him for the delicious meals to which we were treated,
but he immediately held my hand and reminded me, saying: “For decades I
used to be an unannounced guest to many of your grandfathers in LoDagaa
country; they welcomed me into their homes without complaints, and
showed me so much kindness. Your coming here for a few days is nothing
compared with my friendship with many, many Ghanaians.”
After I returned to the United States, I wrote an email to thank him
again for his warm reception. He wrote me back, short and to the point:
“Many thanks for the gorgeous smock which I promise to put to good use.”
(See Figure 2.)
In his eulogy of the late Jack Goody, Stephen Hughes-Jones (2015)
stated that he would hesitate to label him an Africanist. To do so, he ar-
gued, was to underestimate Goody’s enduring concern with cross-regional
comparison and the broad scale of his scholarly influence on disciplines
that spanned philosophy, history, economics, literature, and communi-
cation studies. He noted that until his death, Jack Goody was a leading
scholar of his generation who wrote some 25 books and countless articles;
and for his scholarly erudition and versatility, he was deservedly knighted
by the Queen of England in 2005. But to state that Goody was not an Af-
ricanist is not to diminish his political and social commitment to Africa,
the study of which he encouraged both his colleagues and his students to
pursue at Cambridge. As an example of the many friends Goody made in
Africa, he cited Kum Gandah, whose friendship with Goody started when
the latter first lived at the Birifor chief’s palace as a young field researcher.
This friendship blossomed in London and matured into collaboration in
the bagr ritual recitation, translation, and transcription. Indeed, Goody’s
friendship with Ghana, the village of Birifor, and its chiefly family endured
up to his death.
During my interview with him, he recounted to me that when S. W. D. K.
Gandah passed in 2001, he felt honored to be able to eulogize his friend at
20 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

Figure 2. Jack Goody and the author. (Photo by Francis Kemausuor.)

Gandah’s funeral organized by his daughter, Agatha Palmer, at St. Mark’s

Church Parish Pastoral Center in Kennnington, London. In turn, in 2015,
when news of Goody’s death reached Birifor, the village chief at the time,
Naa Naabomo Gandaa  IV (1939–2016), requested that I help extend his
condolences to the deceased’s family. According to him, he was a young
boy when Goody first lived with the Gandah family, and he wanted Jack’s
family to know that the entire village of Birifor was in mourning for his
passing. As he himself had been taken ill, he could not personally attend
the funeral, but he assured that his niece, Agatha, who lived in London,
would represent the family. The niece did represent the family, and in her
presence, the LoDagaa xylophone music was played to receive the coffin of
the late Goody.
Ethnographic practice and fieldwork have changed dramatically since
Jack Goody pioneered his own fieldwork in northwestern Ghana. This is
due in no small part to easy travel and communication, as well as institu-
tional pressures. Few ethnographers can endure the isolation associated
Lobnibe • Jack Goody 21

with fieldwork, which is necessary to forge and mature long-term relations

with the communities they study and also generate theory from the field.
With Sir Jack Goody’s passing, one may say the era of the Cambridge style
of long-term and intensive fieldwork that became the hallmark of British
social anthropology, with Northern Ghana as its beehive, has come to an
end. However, the major empirical and theoretical contributions of the
works produced by that generation of scholars, led by Meyer Fortes and
Jack Goody, continue to loom large in African and Ghana Studies. As to
Goody’s legacy to Ghana Studies, there can be no doubt that he was consid-
ered one of the most influential anthropologists and thinkers the postwar
era has produced. For Hart (2011), the time he “spent in northern Ghana as
ethnographer provided him the original ground for his extended foray into
world historical comparison” (p. 23).
That an annual Jack Goody lecture series was instituted in 2011 at the
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, to commemorate his
work even before his death is testimony to his enduring scholarly contribu-
tions beyond West African anthropology and his original place of fieldwork.
It is significant that at the inaugural lecture, no other distinguished scholar
but rather his student Keith Hart, who knew him well, was the one invited
to speak on the occasion. In a very erudite lecture titled “Jack Goody’s
­Vision of World History and African Development Today,” Hart first out-
lined Goody’s intellectual genealogy, noting that his subject of study had
always been historical comparison, and beyond that the “development of
human culture.” He went on to pay tribute to his teacher, whom he framed
as a historical actor “coming of age in the Second World War, encounter-
ing the Eastern Mediterranean, escaping from a prison camp into the
mountains of Abruzzo, entering Africa at the decisive moment of its anti-­
colonial revolution and in its epicentre, Ghana. With the European empires
collapsing everywhere he rejects the Eurocentric idea that the West was
special, looking instead for forms of knowledge that are truly universal,
better suited to the new society launched by the war” (Hart, 2011, p. 3).

Isidore Lobnibe
Western Oregon University

Acknowledgement

A Wenner-Gren Foundation historical archive grant (Gr.HAP-65) enabled me to

travel to Cambridge to interview Jack Goody in 2006. I am indebted to Mahir Saul
for facilitating my contact with the late Jack Goody. A larger project was in the
22 Ghana Studies  •  volume 21 • 2018

works based on the extended interview with Goody, but his poor health and un-
timely passing contributed to its delay. A sabbatical year at the Institute for Ad-
vanced Study, Wissenshaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2017–2018 allowed me to revisit the
project, the result of which is this short essay. I thank Daniel Schörnflug and Chris
Hann for stimulating discussions on Jack Goody’s life and intellectual work, which
rekindled my interest in the project. Some comments and suggestions I received
from Carola Lentz and an anonymous reviewer of Ghana Studies helped improve
an earlier draft of the essay, for which I am very grateful.

References

Allman, J. (2013). Kwame Nkrumah, African studies, and the politics of knowledge
production in the Black Star of Africa. International Journal of African Historical
Studies, 46(2), 181–203.
Allman, J., & Parker, J. (2005). Tongnaab: The history of a West African god. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Braimah, J. A., & Goody, J. (Eds.). (1967). Salaga: The struggle for power. London,
England: Longmans.
Drucker-Brown, S. (1989). Notes towards a biography of Meyer Fortes. American
Ethnologist, 16(2), 375–385.
Fortes, M. (1945). The dynamics of clanship among the Tallensi: Being the first part of
an analysis of the social structure of a Trans-Volta tribe. London, England: Oxford
University Press.
Fortes, M. (1949). The web of kinship among the Tallensi. London, England: Oxford
University Press.
Gandah, S. W. D. K. (2004). The silent rebel. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers.
Goody, J. (1956). The social organisation of the LoWiili. London, England: Her Maj-
esty’s Stationery Office.
Goody, J. (1962). Death, property and the ancestors: A study of the mortuary customs
of the Lodagaa of West Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Goody, J. (1991). Towards a room with a view: A personal account of contributions
to local knowledge, theory, and research in fieldwork and comparative studies.
Annual Review of Anthropology, 20(1), 1–23.
Goody, J. (1995). The expansive moment: The rise of social anthropology in Britain and
Africa, 1918–1970. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, J., & Addo, J. N. (1977). Siblings in Ghana. University of Ghana Population
Studies 7. Legon, Ghana: University of Ghana Press.
Goody, J., & Gandah, S. W. D. K. (Eds.). (1980). Une récitation du Bagré. Paris,
France: Armand Colin.
Goody, J., & Gandah, S. W. D. K. (Eds.). (2002). The third Bagré: A myth revisited.
Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Hann, C. (2017). John Rankine Goody (1919–2015). Biographical Memoirs of Fel-
lows of the British Academy, 16, 457–481.
 Lobnibe • Jack Goody 23

Hart, K. (1985). The social anthropology of West Africa. Annual Review of Anthro-
pology, 14(1), 243–272.
Hart, K. (2011). Jack Goody’s vision of world history and African development
today. Inaugural Jack Goody Lecture Series. Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology.
Hart, K. (2015). Obituary: Professor Sir John Rankine Goody FBA (AKA Jack),
1919–2015. Anthropology Today, 31(6), 27–28.
Hughes-Jones, Stephen. (2015). “Professor Sir Jack Goody, 1919–2015.” Published
by Cooperative Funeralcare, Cambridge.
Lentz, C. (2006). Ethnicity and the making of history in Northern Ghana. Edinburgh,
Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
Lentz, C. (Ed.). (2008). The silent rebel: The missing years; Life in the Tamale Middle
School (1940−47), by S. W. D. K. Gandah. Research Review Supplement 18. Legon:
University of Ghana.
Lentz, C. (Ed.). (2009). Gandah-Yir: The house of the brave; The biography of a North-
ern Ghanaian chief (ca. 1872−1950), by S. W. D. K. Gandah. Research Review Sup-
plement 20. Legon: University of Ghana.
Lentz, C. (2012). S. W. D. K. Gandah (1927−2001): Intellectual and historian from
Northern Ghana. Africa, 82(3), 343−355.
Tait, D. (1961). The Konkomba of Northern Ghana. London, England: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.

View publication stats