”Ka Biε Ba Yor”: Labor Migration among the Dagaaba of the Upper West Region of Ghana, 1936–1957

Abstract

The Upper West region (UWR) of Ghana has served as a reservoir of labor for the southern part of the country for most of the twentieth century and today one can find at least three generations of migrants in any given community whose experiences both mirror and differ substantially from migrants in other parts of Africa. Attempts to explain this phenomenon have centered on theories of overpopulation, taxation, lack of resources, and “bright lights,” which compelled northerners – Dagaaba to migrate to the south in search of wage labor. These explanations of migration are inadequate because they are constrained by a static, normative vision of the lone twentieth century migrant worker traveling south in search of wage labor bereft of pre-colonial precedents. This article contributes to the on-going discussion on labor migration in Africa by foregrounding the internal ways in which communities themselves shaped migration through extended social debates over production and reproduction.