Party Politics and Traditional Authority in Ghana: The Case of the Bono Kyempim Chiefs Association

Abstract

This paper examines the basis for the Bono Kyempim chiefs' alliance with the Convention Peoples' Party (CPP) of Ghana in the 1950s. It also evaluates the effects of the alliance on the Bono Kyempim states. The Bono Kyempim states allegedly suffered indignities as members of the Asante Confederacy in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. When the Asante chiefs openly supported the National Liberation Movement (NLM), a Kumasi-based political movement in 1954, the Bono Kyempim chiefs agitated for secession from Asante. To attract electoral votes from the Bono area in the multi-party national elections in the mid-1950s, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president and his Convention Peoples Party (CPP), openly supported the Bono Kyempim chiefs and in fulfilment of his promise to the Bono chiefs, created the Brong-Ahafo Region in 1959. The Bono chiefs' alliance with the CPP affected villages and towns, the traditional Bono states' relations with their Asante neighbours, the chieftaincy institution and ordinary citizens. Using information gathered from interviews with informants and qualitative analysis of archival and secondary sources, the paper contends that the politicization of chieftaincy among the Bono Kyempim of Ghana had some positive effects but deep and lasting negative implications on chieftaincy in the Bono Kyempim states during and after the 1950s