Continuous primitive accumulation in Ghana: the real-life stories of dispossessed peasants in three mining communities

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide an opportunity for the peasants in three mining communities in Ghana to voice their experiences of primitive accumulation under contemporary global neo-liberalism. There is a plethora of literature on the exploitation of Africa, drawing on theories of new imperialism or ‘accumulation by dispossession’. However, there is not much grassroots empirical work on how different social groups experience accumulation by dispossession. It seems that NGOs and journalists do better on this than intellectuals. I seek in this article to contribute to filling this lacuna, by focusing on the hardest hit social group, namely, the peasants. I also argue that the existence of this lacuna has major theoretical and political implications for the struggle for alternatives to capitalism and ‘development’ that is distinctly anti-imperialist. The article is based on data collected through focus group discussions and in-depth personal interviews with peasants affected by surface mining activities of transnational mining corporations in three mining communities in the resource-rich Western Region of Ghana: Prestea, Dumasi and Teberebie.

Keywords:

• Ghana
• primitive accumulation
• enclosures
• dispossession
• peasants
• development
• global capital

Acknowledgements

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, Canada provided funding for the doctoral research on which this article is based. I am very grateful for their assistance. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

For example, FIAN International, a human rights NGO, has documented the atrocities that Iduapriem's mining activities are wreaking on the people of Teberebie and has used social media to publicise them to the wider public (see FIAN 2009).

This is by no means to uncritically glorify this traditional landownership system as pristine and free of inequality or non-capitalist class divisions. As documented by Dumett (1998, pp. 272–273), this system was corrupted during the Wassa ‘gold rush’ when chiefs commercialised land by leasing it to foreign mining firms and the local capitalist class. This practice has continued till today, as illustrated by Kojo Amanor in his study of Southeastern Ghana (Amanor 2010). This notwithstanding, the traditional communal system has proved resilient, so the assertion that Ghanaian peasants are not landless is still valid.