Nahu-kparilim (cattle caretakership): understanding the persistence of unfree Fulani labour and the (non)violent renegotiation of power relations in agrarian economies in northern Ghana

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on how Fulani outsider status, often maintained through several generations, constitutes the basis for unequal labour, land and associated relations. It discusses how static forms of ‘fixed’ citizenship and socioeconomic immobility both maintain and intensify labour precarity, rendering the Fulani more vulnerable to the whims, caprices and avarice of their native ‘overlords’, as evidenced by the practice of nahu-kparilim in Ghana. The article’s main interest is thus land and labour injustice rather than pastoral production and related livelihood activities. Integrating the theories of unfreedom, social reproduction and subalternity, the article contributes to unfree labour studies by demonstrating that despite being constrained in complex ways, unfree labourers have the agency to renegotiate power relations. This advances the idea of unfree labourers’ agency which, in comparison to their immiseration, receives less attention in scholarship on unfreedom.