Assistance and resistance of (hydro-)power: Contested relationships of control over the Volta River,Ghana

Prologue

When living in Ghana’s capital city, Accra, in 2014, I was conducting my regular commute from work to home in Ghana’s most common public transport choice: the tro tro, which is a type of minivan. As it started to rain outside, I looked with sympathy at the soggy pedestrians beyond the windows, considering myself to be somewhat lucky to not have to alight at a stop anytime soon and brave the deluge. However, soon the first trickle of water seeped through the cracks of the tro tro’s corroding roof, and every new exclamation from a passenger announced a new rivulet of water in the vehicle’s interior. The tro tro’s fare manager, known as a mate, removed his shirt to press it against the roof, wrung out the excess water and repeated the process in a valiant but vain attempt to dam the flow. As he did this, he positively marketed the experience to his customers with a confident (and commonly uttered) statement that ‘water is life.’ Equally confidently, while wringing out a face washer and attempting to plug the back corner of the tro tro, a customer good-humouredly countered that ‘rain is death.’

As the rain initially seeped, and eventually gushed, its way through the usually well-defined boundaries of inside and outside, the process made me consider how much control humans and their human creations (in this case a beaten up, second hand tro tro) really have over the surrounding environment and natural phenomena such as water. How and when does human control over water’s flow work to make ‘water as [is] life’ in the physical and social sense? How and when does human infrastructural control over water fail, break down and threaten to become disorder? What are the relationships and links between the control, or lack of control, of water?

Introduction

As both biologically essential and culturally negotiated, water offers a useful lens to analyse both human–environment and human–human relations as socially learnt through what Krause and Strang term ‘hydro-sociality’ (2016; see also Anand, 2011; Linton and Budds, 2014). They explain that ‘[c]onsidering social and hydrological relations together, rather than as two fundamentally different ways of relating, opens up a more critical and politically more sensitive approach’ (Krause and Strang, 2016: 635; see also Cless and Hahn, 2012: 9). A hydro-social approach applies to conventional ‘human’ politics as well as political spheres that also incorporate non-human life (Krause and Strang, 2016: 635).

In Ghana, as optimistically and ironically announced by the tro tro fare manager in the opening story, water is popularly framed by its productive qualities: ‘water is life’. It stands to reason, therefore, that ‘control of water is inevitably control of life and livelihood’ (Ward, 1997: 32, cited in Strang, 2004: 21). Due to its fluidity of form, water particularly appeals to human efforts of manipulation via infrastructure. It is in conversation with Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic societies (1957) as conditioned by large-scale constructions of infrastructure (Bichsel, 2016: 359) that this paper begins.

In this article, I examine human attempts to control water, and water’s inherent potential for disorder, in modern Ghana. I am responding to Wittfogel’s argument about the model of a ‘hydraulic society’ (1957: 3) and how state control of water resources facilitate control of human populations. I suggest that, in relative historical correlation to the publication of Wittfogel’s (1957) work on Oriental Despotism, former president Kwame Nkrumah’s famous vision of Ghanaian nationalism and pan-African sovereignty was a kind of Wittfogelian reading of waterscapes as manipulated to facilitate political power. In the conception and construction of the massive Akasombo Dam in the traditional area of the Akwamu people in southern Ghana, Nkrumah attempted to reshape society through the control of water.

Local Akwamu people, not surprisingly, have different visions about who can control water, how water can (or sometimes cannot) be controlled, and how deities are the most authoritative actors in any human engagements with water and its flow. Akwamu understandings of hydro-sociality can instead be seen as a critique of Wittfogelian models of hydraulic societies. In this article, I draw on more recent work on semiotics and materiality, especially the work of Fontein and also Keane, bringing them into conversation with Wittfogel, to suggest how water’s ‘indexical’ (causal or connective) relationship to power is always a matter of contest, and water’s material properties means it ultimately escapes definitive human control through infrastructure or other means.

In the first part of this article, I consider how Wittfogel’s political assessment of the hydraulic society, despotic in nature by controlling people through controlling water, finds resonance with Nkrumah’s vision and construction of the Akosombo hydro-electric dam. This project underpinned Nkrumah’s construction of newly independent Ghanaian nation, and an imagined soon-to-be free broader African continent, that sought self-determination through infrastructure ‘as a springboard for industrialisation’ (Hadjor, 1988: 76).

I then extend and add complexity to Wittfogel’s model of the hydraulic society, bringing his work into conversation with Fontein and Keane in relation to signs and symbols, specifically considering water as an index of power. Fontein cautions that water’s force, seen as an index of human political power, is never absolute due to water’s inherent unpredictability. With this in mind, I will then look at the broader historical waterscape of this area pre-dam construction and consider how Akwamu traditional authorities interpret water’s inherent uncertainty not in relation to human control via infrastructure, but rather in relationship to non-human deities. By unpacking the role of water in the Odwira ritual in Ghana, I will consider how Akwamu people symbolically harness water to reinforce relationships between the spiritual world and existing traditional authorities ‘to confirm and bulwark their own legitimacy’ (Wittfogel, 1957: 40).

Finally, through the case study of an electricity crisis due to low rainfall to feed the Akosombo Dam, I will explore how traditional Akwamu authorities capitalised on the uncooperative nature of water to contest state control of people when control of water is seen to have failed. In water’s unruliness, alternative power sources are pointed beyond the limits of the human. ¹

A spectacle of modernisation: Kwame Nkrumah and the Akosombo Dam

The Akosombo Dam, located on traditional Akwamu territory, is the site of Ghana’s largest hydro-electric project catering to national and international energy needs. Its construction formed Lake Volta which eventually covered one-ninth of the entire country (Rooney, 2007: 230) and resulted in a government-led population resettlement of 78,000–80,000 residents (Graham, 1982; Miescher, 2012: 367, 2014: 358; Moxon, 1969) from 700 inundated communities (Gyau-Boakye, 2001: 25). In so doing, the dam vastly altered these peoples’ relationships with their fresh water environment. While some Akwamu villages lie north of the Akosombo Dam wall and were, as a result, resettled due to flooding from damming the Volta River, in this article I will not focus on impacts of resettlement but instead analyse assertions of authority over this water.

Although plans to construct a dam to power an aluminium smelter originated during the colonial period (Graham, 1982; Moxon, 1969; Rooney, 2007: 216), the Akosombo Dam was realised amidst a wave of post-independence fervour between 1961 and 1965. It became the linchpin, and a ‘principal monument’ (Bretton, 1966: 150) of President Kwame Nkrumah’s vision and drive for national industrial development albeit financed through international partnerships (Hadjor, 1988: 78; Omari, 1970: 101–102; Rooney, 2007: 217). Nkrumah wrote, ‘[i]t was obvious that the project would have to wait for independence and that I would have to take upon myself the task of enlisting financial help from overseas’ (1963: 115). Omari adds that it was Nkrumah’s ‘personal intervention both at home … and abroad … which obtained the finance for the dam project. This convinced him even more of the paramountcy of the political approach on all spheres’ (1970: 101–102). Nkrumah engaged the United States, United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as potential financiers against the backdrop of the cold war (Hadjor, 1988: 81–82; Rooney, 2007; Smertin, 1987: 108–109). While doing so, however, Nkrumah held fast to ‘his belief that small developing nations had to avoid becoming client states of either superpower [the United States or the USSR]’ or fall into a pattern of neo-colonialism, and his priorities were Ghana and the pan-African continent (Rooney, 2007: 224).

Nkrumah viewed water, power and infrastructure as the necessary components to drive Ghana forward as a nation. The Akosombo Dam ‘had the ambition of transforming the entire country, its economy and society’ (Miescher, 2014: 358). The project served as a ‘spectacle of modernization’ (Miescher, 2014: 352) and fit within the socialist policy held by Nkrumah and his political party – the Convention People’s Party (CPP) – which entailed ‘“central planning” in order to ensure that the entire resources of the State, both human and material, are employed to the best interests of all people’ (Omari, 1970: 103). Sir Robert Jackson remarked that ‘Ghana has developed most successfully one of the most precious natural resources, the waters of the Volta, and that from now on it will have at its disposal some of the cheapest power in the world’ (cited in Moxon, 1969). However, while the Akosombo Dam did, and continues to, power large parts of the nation, the changes brought about by the hydro-electric industry and its supporting infrastructure (e.g. schools and hospitals) and associated developments in Akosombo were massive.

In addition to major disruptions caused to the Volta River’s flow in the wake of constructions, the dam produced a human flow of non-Akwamu residents into Akwamu territory. This influx inevitably had an impact on customary human–environment relations which were mediated by traditional authorities by virtue of their relationship with the spiritual beings deemed integral to the place. Migration presented new challenges to the Akwamu in terms of ensuring adherence to customary taboos related to accessing the water – such as no fishing on certain sacred Akan days and no access to the water by menstruating women – with an increasingly diverse ethnic population who brought their own attitudes and relationships to water to the region.

It is tempting to think of Akwamu understandings of the Volta River as traditional and religiously imbued and Nkrumah’s understandings of the Volta post-dam as modern and secular. However, Nkrumah himself seems to have afforded space for traditional religious understanding of Ghana. ‘Nkrumaism’ has been described as ‘a non-atheist socialist philosophy … socialism adapted to conditions in Africa and African tradition’ (Baako, 1961: 4–5) which ‘refused atheism as being out of touch with the African’s notion of spirituality’ (Poe, 2003: 4).

Rather than resist religion, Nkrumah sought to capitalise on African tradition to reinforce his authority over the nation’s waterscape and soon to be flooded land as manipulated through infrastructure. This is exemplified in his account of the opening ceremony for dam constructions:

I officially launched the Volta River scheme by pressing a button to dynamite a slice out of the hillside at Akosombo. Hundreds of people danced, cheered, sang and fired guns into the air as the local chief poured libation and offered a sheep in sacrifice. One of my greatest dreams was coming true. (Nkrumah, 1963: 117; see also Rooney, 2007: 233)

In sum, Nkrumah did not actively seek to clothe his authority to block, manipulate and harness the Volta River’s (hydro-)power in any form of spiritual favour. Rather, he sought to harness control over the Volta’s power (and through hydro-energy production to harness people) through infrastructural development. As such, he claimed political responsibility for the national and pan-African community in viewing the dam as an example of how Africa could self-determine its course by autonomously developing natural resources – hydro-power. Nkrumah’s industrialisation of water was depicted as the technical path to an independent and economic nation-wide modernisation in ways that reflect Wittfogel’s hydraulic society. Although claiming ‘no one should be worse off’ (Miescher, 2014: 359) Nkrumah’s vision squarely rested on state (and international investors’) rather than local interests. His account does not specifically mention the ‘local chief’s’ language, ethnicity, and precise locality. This suggests that the symbol of ‘local’ chiefly authority has in fact been de-contextualised and henceforth symbolised support for a national project comprising not only the dam-building scheme but also Nkrumah’s personal visions and politics more generally.

In conversation: Wittfogel, Fontein and water as power

Wittfogel (1957) directly connected control of water and control of people in his analysis of hydraulic civilisations under despotic rule. Wittfogel stresses the specific biophysical qualities of water such as its weightiness and following of gravity, its mobility and its uneven pooling in lower parts of landscape (Bichsel, 2016: 359). It was these qualities – the weightiness of water in relation to land topography – that eventually led to the dam being constructed at Akosombo rather than elsewhere in Ghana (Rooney, 2007: 219). Due to these qualities, water is not evenly distributed in all places nor evenly accessible to all humans. Bichsel writes that Wittfogel ‘understands waters as political in the sense of linking and ordering human beings along spatial and social topographies, which require and reinforce centralised and hierarchised political control’ (2016: 359).

Much of Wittfogel’s analysis is drawn from a quite specific geographical environment consisting of ‘arid landscapes’ and ‘semiarid landscapes’ which explains his focus on irrigation (1957: 19, 109). This environment differs significantly from the Akwamu-inhabited territory which is traversed by (mostly) reliable rivers and experiences two rainy seasons a year. Thus, although Akwamu traditionally have practised water-dependent agriculture, regular rainfall has made irrigation less necessary. Only when the need for greater power for the (emerging independent) nation arose was industrial infrastructure of a significant scale introduced to the Akwamu traditional area in the form of hydro-power dams. It was the national, rather than local, political and industrial needs that brought Ghana into such a Wittfogelian model under Nkrumah’s vision. At the formal opening of the Volta River Project on 22 January 1966, Nkrumah ‘reminded his audience and the wider world that a small, dynamic independent state like Ghana must attain control of its economic and political destiny in order to banish the legacies of the colonial past and the threat of neo-colonialism’ (Rooney, 2007: 234). The Akosombo Dam was, for Nkrumah, a key way to achieve this and in doing so to consolidate the role of the nation state and his authority within it since ‘in Ghana…[t]he party is the State and the State is the Party’ (Osei, 1962: 11).

Wittfogel’s work finds resonance with the pre-independent local Akwamu state when he talks about human authority over the use of and relationship to water being fortified by a favoured relationship with the divine being(s) thought to be ultimately responsible for that water. Wittfogel perhaps recognises the ‘infrastructure’ of religious authority as ‘social structure’ (Ertsen, cited in Bichsel, 2016: 367) in relation to water. For he notes that ‘the majority of all hydraulic civilisations are characterised by large and influential priesthoods. Yet it would be wrong to designate them as hierocratic, or “rule by priests”’ (Wittfogel, 1957: 90). Indeed, traditional Akwamu beliefs attest that it is not the priests who rule the water environment, nor is it the paramount or other chiefs. Rather, it is the deity of each particular river and tributary that ultimately rules over the wellbeing of the Akwamu people through mediating and orchestrating the conditions of the water environment. And it is chiefs and priests who are responsible to ritually maintain hydro-social relations with these deities.

Instead of hierocracy, Wittfogel rather suggests some ‘tribal hydraulic governments were theocratically shaped,’ (1957: 92) that is ruled by god(s) but mediated by priests. In such theocratically shaped societies, Wittfogel asserts, ‘the original pattern usually persisted even under more complex institutional conditions’ (1957: 92). I hold that the traditional Akwamu religious ideas about responsibility persists under, but does not directly reflect, larger state institutionalised notions of water control and hydro-power, as originally articulated by Kwame Nkrumah and continued by the Volta River Authority body corporate. In fact, I propose that Akwamu people’s – particularly traditional authorities’ – persistence in articulating a hydro-sociality as tied to an exclusively favoured relationship to deities thought to control the Volta’s water works as resistance to national claims of control.

In considering control of water as well as social hierarchies of authorities that are responsible for water management, as indicated by Wittfogel, I look to Fontein’s (2015) framing of water as an index of power. Fontein draws on Peirce’s (1955) theory of signs, and Keane’s (1997, 2003, 2005) and Engelke’s (2007) use of this work, to conceptualise water as something that indexes social power. He writes:

If the meaning of symbols are based on convention, and therefore arbitrary, then the meanings of icons and indexes are based on a material relationship between these signs and what they represent; they ‘are defined, at least in part, by the qualities of materiality’ […] Icons are ‘likenesses … of the objects they represent’ […] But an index ‘points to something’, and this ‘pointing-to can also involve (or imply) causality’. […] the object being represented in some way causes the index. (Fontein, 2015: 109)

In the following sections, I will specifically consider how and to what extent water indexes the authority of either local or national heads of state – the Akwamu paramount chief as opposed to the former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah – through an analysis of the Odwira festival and the Akosombo Dam construction. The key point about water as an index of power is that it is ultimately unpredictable, slipping beyond reliable human control. After considering each case, I will explore how Akwamu, who assert a relationship with divine power as indexed through water, seek to undermine or destabilise national claims to authority over water.

Localised relationships and responsibility: Akwamu and the Volta River

The Akwamu are a part of the Akan-speaking people located in the Eastern Region in the southern part of modern-day Ghana. Originally the Akwamu were a large, military-organised people with territories expanding vastly to the west and later the east of the Volta River in modern-day Ghana, Togo and Benin (Agyekum, 2015; Wilks, 2001). However, due to historical military defeats the Akwamu now claim ownership over a much smaller area of land north and south of the Akosombo Dam around Lake Volta and the Volta River.

For many of the communities in the Akwamu traditional area, residents consist of Akwamu people, others settled in the area previously, and migrants who have come for socio-economic livelihood opportunities post-Akosombo Dam construction. Unlike their post-dam migrated neighbours – most noticeably the Ewe who heavily rely on river and lake fishing for their livelihoods – most Akwamu tend to focus on (mainly rain-fed) agriculture and trading activities for income. This has meant that the Akwamu have traditionally utilised the Volta River’s water less as an economic input and more as a communal resource for purposes both quotidian (i.e., drinking, washing, transport, etc.) and sacred (i.e., in purification rituals as outlined below in this article). Some Akwamu people have taken up economic ventures in the form of aqua-culture and passenger ferries. However, these industries are vulnerable to the Volta River Authority’s manipulation of the Volta’s flow in the timing and quantity of water released at the Akosombo Dam upstream. Resident fish farmers and a boat operator (2017, personal communication) attributed significant economic losses in dead fish – due to rapidly changing water currents and altered water levels (described to me as ‘upwelling’) – to such dam releases about which they said the Volta River Authority does not pre-warn.

The Akwamu share similar ritual activities and traditional beliefs with many other Akan groups (cf. Agyekum, 2015; Rattray, 1923, 1927; Wilks, 2001). Along with many other southern Ghanaian societies (cf. Akyeampong, 2001; Greene, 1952; Rattray, 1923, 1927), Akwamu believe that supernatural forces/beings are unalienably associated with natural features. In the Akwamu people’s case, and at least partly for geographical and historical reasons, the Volta River, known locally as Asuo Firaw, its tributaries and other water sources are key sites.

For the Akwamu, their history and continued identity are tied to a privileged relationship with the spiritually imbued Volta River. This connection is traced to a conflict with the Akyem people in 1729 and 1730 which triggered the Akwamu’s original crossing of the river (Agyekum, 2015; Fynn, 1971: 70–71; Wilks, 2001). Wilks writes that:

A section of the defeated Akwamu army retreated eastwards but were pursued by a rebel force of hill peoples and overtaken whilst trying to cross the Volta … It seems likely however that a number of the loyal Akwamus did succeed in crossing the Volta to the relative safety of the east bank where they established a town that was later to become the new (and present) Akwamu capital … Akwamu traditions tell of a time when an Akwamu army, closely pursued by the enemy, arrived at the Volta near Senchi only to find no canoes available for the crossing. When all seemed lost a bush pig was seen to make its way to the opposite bank, and the whole army was able to follow. (Wilks, 2001: 86)

These accounts demonstrates how Akwamu personhood is traditionally defined in partnership rather than at odds with the river (and land) environment and Akwamu deities. What happens to a Wittfogelian reading of hydro-power when a third actor enters into the relationship? Many Akwamu people still subscribe to traditional beliefs that non-human spiritual figures control water. How then does this control influence control over humans?

The Akwamu believe it was their deity, and the ancestor’s acceptance of this deity’s superior power as indexed through water, that facilitated the Akwamu crossing of the Volta River which enabled their survival and continued existence. The Akwamu believe their deities to have an exclusive mastery over this section of the Volta River that some other groups did and do not, including that of the nation-state. My point is that the exclusive relationships that the Akwamu assert with water and their gods may be utilised to resist national notions of control over water and humans.

The Akwamu, like other Akan groups, are a hierarchical society. Human leadership rests with the paramount chief to which queen mothers, sub-chiefs, traditional shrine priests and linguists (nominated spokesperson for chiefs) provide counsel and keep the paramount chief accountable to perform ritual and governance functions on behalf of the people without abusing this power. Akwamu authorities – such as chiefs, queen mothers and linguists – are originally customarily nominated locally by Akwamu people rather than by a centralised administrative body. However, customary law operates in line with the legal pluralism inherent in national Ghanaian leadership and law (Apoh et al., 2017: 6, 8). Furthermore, customary law is recognised in the Constitution of the Republic of Ghana (Government of Ghana, 1992: article 11(1)–(2); see also Newbury, 1964: 68). Ghana’s legally plural leadership, which harks from a sometimes tense history between central government and traditional authorities (Smertin, 1987: 51), has implications for authority and responsibility for resources, including water.

At the national level, water is perceived as ‘as an integral part of the ecosystem and other natural resources, and a social and economic good, whose quantity and quality determine the nature of its utilization’ (Government of Ghana, 2007: 63). Regarding ownership (see Wittfogel, 1957: 303), ‘property in and control of all water resources is vested in the President on behalf of, and in trust for the people of the Republic [of Ghana]’ (Government of Ghana, 1996: section 12).

Locally, however, the Akwamu people continue to articulate traditional beliefs that deities exist in and control every river and water tributary (Nana Afari, Akwamu chief for Apeguso Dwenease, 2016, personal communication; Nana Appiah-Nti III, Akwamu chief for Appiahkrom, 2016, personal communication; Odeneho Kwafo Akoto III, 2016, personal communication). These deities, in turn, are asserted to be in an exclusive customary relationship with the Akwamu people, particularly Akwamu traditional authorities, rather than nation-state authorities.

While rivers such as the Volta are considered ‘a mother for everybody’ (Philip Sabla, Mangoase opinion leader, 2017, personal communication), the responsibility to maintain a strong relationship with the deity thought to control the river ultimately rests with the chief for that area. However, the avenue of communication and enactment of rituals is often delegated to a specific shrine priest or other traditional spokesperson such as a linguist on behalf of the chief and broader people. Such responsibilities may include building, presiding over and preserving shrines set up to communicate with Akwamu deities, undertaking ceremonial obligations to the deities, and observing taboos individually prescribed for shrine priests as well as more general taboos related to the river for all Akwamu.

The Volta River is ‘a very sacred river in the Akwamu’s life’, according to Odeneho Kwafo Akoto III (2016, personal communication), and the parent river to the other tributaries (its children) that feed it (Nana Tete Amo, shrine priest for the Volta River at Adjena Pesse, 2016, personal communication). According to local beliefs, the paramount chief represents the ancestors and deities of the Akwamu people in relation to the Volta River. In addition, the traditional shrine priest residing at Adjena Pesse also manages ceremonial responsibility to the deity, known as Mfodwo, of the Volta (Odeneho Kwafo Akoto III, 2016, personal communication).

Other religious understandings – particularly those of various denominations of Christianity and to a lesser extent Islam – are present and sometimes co-exist with the worldviews of many Akwamu people in relation to their environment. However, fundamental values of the Akwamu state regarding water and its associated gods are still strongly held in the area. That these persist simultaneously with more recently introduced religious world-views, and that Akwamu traditional beliefs are particular and their relationship to local deities believed to be exclusive to those from the area, is key to this article. Due to limited space, this article does not provide a deeper analysis of Christian and other understandings, and focus will be limited to pre-Christian Akwamu beliefs that continue today.

When analysing ‘hydro-sociality’ – the conjunction of social and hydrological relations (Krause and Strang, 2016: 634) – it is important to analyse the hierarchal order within such hydro-socialities. Akwamu water deities have a higher standing than Akwamu people. Various parts of the river are occupied and ‘owned’ by various ethnic groups. Akwamu people believe they have greater authority over a certain part of the Volta River than other ‘stranger’ or non-Akwamu residents (such as the coastal Ga, or Ewe, the fishing livelihoods of whom were disrupted after the construction of the Akosombo Dam) who migrated into this area at a later date. Akwamu leaders lay claim to this greater authority through ritual and other practices demonstrating an intimate relationship with water deities at the top of the hydro-social hierarchy.

Challenges to this hierarchy, often framed as human arrogance or boastfulness over the deities in the environment, are forbidden and punishable. For example, it is believed that if a person swims across the Volta, gets out on the other bank, then returns to swim back across the river and immediately gets out again without waiting to rest, this person will die (Nana Afrakoma II, queen mother of Akwamu, 2017, personal communication; Nana Samanhyia Darko III, 2016, personal communication). This action is believed to insult the river deity for the person suggests they are more powerful than the river, and such boastfulness of human power over nature is believed to be punishable by death (Nana Samanhyia Darko III, 2016, personal communication).

This claimed superior intimacy between Akwamu and the divine is exemplified in ritual moments in which, according to Wittfogel (1957: 40), ‘the position, fate, and prestige of the secular masters of hydraulic society were [and are] closely interlinked with that of their divine protectors […] to confirm and bulwark their own legitimacy.’ One such case is the Odwira festival to which I turn now.

Channelling power through water: The Odwira festival

The Odwira festival serves to recognise Akan leaders of the past, to subvert and then restore social cohesion in the present ‘and to cleanse the nation from defilement’ (Fynn, 1971: 34). Indeed, the festival’s name derives from the word ‘dwira’ meaning to cleanse, or to purify (McCaskie, 1995: 144; Rattray, 1927: 127). It is a time ‘not only for the cleansing of the nation, but the purification of shrines of ancestral spirits, of the gods, and of lesser non-human spirits’ (Rattray, 1927: 127).

Commenting on an Akan group closely related to the Akwamu – the Asante – McCaskie highlights the Odwira’s (rain-fed) agricultural connection, for the festival required an ‘indispensable preliminary to the consumption of newly harvested yams … that indicated the state’s control over food, and through it, over the baseline conditions of all material and social reality’ (1995: 147). Although McCaskie highlights a food crop as the bottom line of authority over said material and social reality, he does so in connection to water for ‘the primordial beginnings of this system [which] lay in the agricultural cycle, and beyond that in the seasonal periodicity of the rains upon which all farming enterprises depended’ (1995: 157). Thus, McCaskie’s analysis articulates well with Wittfogel’s broader argument that control over water facilitates control over people.

With the enabling participation of the paramount chief ‘the odwira was a reading, a review and an affirmation by the state of its own hermeneutical master text’ (McCaskie, 1995: 147). In the Odwira, water – as a ritually (and physically) cleansing medium – plays an important role highlighting both the relatedness and customary hierarchy of Akan peoples (cf. McCaskie, 1995: 231–233, 236–237; Rattray, 1927: 126).

For the Akwamu, it is water from certain rivers that serves as a substance of purification and blessing. This ritual in fact indexes the power of the paramount chief over the Akwamu people. Although the Akwamu people have not practised the full Odwira festival for many years, certain aspects of the festival are still adapted and performed at other Akwamu ceremonies such as homecomings (Okyeame Ampadu, Akwamu linguist, 2017, personal communication) and its importance as a ritual is still discussed by Akwamu. One informant referred to an account of the Odwira festival posted on Odeneho Kwafo Akoto III’s public Facebook page. He read out excerpts of this page to me and explained how the religiously meaningful Volta River water becomes incorporated by the paramount chief to bulwark (Wittfogel, 1957: 40) his legitimacy to rule over the Akwamu people.

For the Akwamu people, the Odwira festival:

… is a political, religious and social festival. The celebrations last a whole week … Sunday is the most important day … At one o'clock [on Sunday] the Akrahene or the chief of the soul-washers who is responsible for the cleansing of the soul of the paramount chief leads a band to the Volta and fills covered brass pans with water from the river. He brings it home under the shelter of a state umbrella, preceded by state sword-bearers, and takes it to the house of the Kyidomhene, Chief of the Rear guard. This is the water with which the Omanhene [the paramount chief] is to cleanse his subjects.

Assisting (hydro-)power: Water as an index of power

If, as Fontein (2015) argues, water is an index of power, how have Nkrumah, Akwamu authorities, and the Volta River Authority articulated the (hydro-)power of the Volta River? Akwamu people’s spiritual relationship with the Volta River is indexed by the fact that they enjoy a safe and intimate relation with the river if compared with other groups as they see it. This is demonstrated in the story of the bush pig that helped the Akwamu (but not their enemies) to cross the Volta without drowning.

But water is also adapted as an index of national power, as seen in the Akosombo dam infrastructure and human manipulation of water’s flow. The Akosombo Dam project ‘directly indexed the personal agency of Nkrumah, and literalized his vision of a modernist pan-Africanist future, entailing a teleology of progress that sought to combine rapid modernization with the retention of existing traditions’ (Yarrow, 2017: 570). The project becomes an indexical icon, in the sense that the sheer size, technical sophistication and durability of the Akosombo Dam is a diagram of Nkrumah’s intended legacy to build ‘a great monolithic party’ (speech by Nkrumah March 1961, cited in Rooney, 2007: 225) and socialist nation and continent through industry and to mark ‘Africa’s self-realization’ (Rahman, 2007: 42) and place in the world. Nkrumah saw the dam-building project not only as a means for hydro-electricity, but ‘as a symbol and keystone for all his plans for the development of Ghana as a modern industrial country’ (Rooney, 2007: 218).

Keane suggests that ‘an index signifies by virtue of a real relationship of causation or contiguity to its object’ (1997: 19). According to him,

Indexes are of particular importance linking representations to their contexts and conditions of possibility. Like the signs of charismatic authority, they seem ‘natural’ that is, not the result of intentional action … the more natural a sign of charisma seems, the more irresistible the authority of its bearer … Conversely, to the extent that people recognize that a sign is a symbol, they may be more prone to seek out the intentions and agency of a sign user. (Keane, 1997: 20)

Resisting (hydro-)power: Interpretations of water as an uncooperative and unpredictable index

‘Water is full of contradictions’ (Cless and Hahn, 2012: 10) and, as ‘a mobile, fluid and fugitive resource with an inherent uncertainty about its quantity and location’ (Bichsel, 2016: 257), it always remains to some degree an uncooperative material. There is thus always a level of risk when people invest in this medium as an index of their power and authority.

Fontein looks to rain water to exemplify this point. With regards to Lake Mutirikwi in Zimbabwe he notes that both ‘successful or failing rains can index the legitimacy of chiefs, mediums and even government, and in turn the sovereignty of ancestors as owners of the land, and ultimately, of Mwari as the [spiritual] provider of rain’ (2015: 109). Cooperative water, in this sense, can legitimise power and uncooperative water can equally undermine legitimacy.

Fontein further notes that water’s ‘multiple, changing and fluid material properties and forms, [are] reflecting an uncertainty which easily defies singular rationalities of meaning and rule’ (2015: 85). He argues that if water is to be understood as an index of power and a contestation of legitimacy and sovereignty ‘across the different regimes of rule it saturates,’ then it is unclear what legitimacy or ownership is being indexed (Fontein, 2015: 85). But it is precisely human efforts of trying to clarify whose legitimacy is at stake that is interesting.

We need to keep in mind that water’s power can index non-human authority, which in turn is articulated by particular people in consolidating their claims to ownership over both water and people. In this last section, I ask how local Akwamu understandings of waterscapes as well as interpretations of water as uncooperative and unpredictable push back against national claims of authority. The answer lies at least partly in the Akwamu claim to a favoured relationship with the gods, believed to be ultimately responsible for this hydro-power, as I demonstrate through the following story.

In 2015, Ghana experienced what was popularly termed ‘dum sɔ’ (in the Akan Twi language meaning ‘off-on’) – persistent and irregular power outages. At a national level, dum sɔ was attributed to unusually low levels of rainfall leading to reduced water levels in Lake Volta and poor performance of Ghana’s three hydro-power dams; Akosombo and its smaller cousins, the Kpong and the Bui dams, on the Volta and Black Volta rivers, respectively. While scientific, meteorological and even Christian explanations were offered to account for low precipitation, the Akwamu had their own interpretation. Before the Akosombo Dam was constructed, the Akwamu had regularly sacrificed animals and offered schnapps as libations to the river’s gods as part of religious cleansing/purifying efforts addressing the gods and the river environment (Odeneho Kwafo Akoto III, 2016, personal communication). However, these practices are said to have ceased about 20 years ago. While acknowledging that the Volta River Authority might offer scientific explanations for the lack of rain, Odeneho Kwafo Akoto III interpreted the significantly low water level of Lake Volta as a divine expression of anger in view of ceremonial neglect.

To rectify this, on 9 April 2015, in the midst of the dum sɔ crisis, the Akwamu held a purification ritual ceremony on the western bank of the Lake Volta to induce rain. A report of the occasion states that ‘[t]he main purpose of the rituals was a please to the gods of the [Volta] lake to increase the water volume … for the Volta River Authority to generate more power to calm down the crisis’ (Akwamu Traditional Council, 2015: 4). The ceremony was attended by the paramount chief, the paramount queen mother, the acting president of the Akwamu Traditional Council and the chief traditional shrine priest from Adjene Pesse, as representative Akwamu authorities responsible for the Volta River. In this ritual, schnapps was poured as libations into the lake. A white fowl was then slaughtered, and mashed yams and boiled eggs consumed by Akwamu authorities present, and all these items thrown into the lake. Following this, a cow and sheep were slaughtered, allowing their flowing blood to converge with the lake in an act of offering that was ‘considered the most vital ritual’ of the entire ceremony (Akwamu Traditional Council, 2015: 4). Through these sacrifices the Akwamu appealed to the gods of all the tributaries to the Volta – described as ‘the source of survival’ by Odeneho Kwafo Akoto III (2017, personal communication), as they feed the sacred Volta River – to gather in the main lake and to journey to the site where the libations were being offered, thus bringing along with them additional water to the lake. An Akwamu report observed that as the animal blood flowed into the lake, ‘suddenly it started raining indicating the acceptance of the ritual by the gods according to the chief priest present’ (Akwamu Traditional Council, 2015: 4). The chief priest thus interpreted the timing of this rain water, in response to Akwamu ritual actions, as an acceptance and reinforcement a unique local relationship between Akwamu leaders and the gods of Lake Volta and its tributary rivers.

In this ritual, the Akwamu reconfirmed their beliefs in the gods that control water and the efficacy of their local relationship with them. The Akwamu interpreted water’s return as indexing their ‘natural’ (Keane, 1997: 20) connection with and authority over the Volta River, via their deities, and undermining the Volta River Authority and Ghanaian government’s claims of mastery and responsibility over the environment through infrastructure and (hydro-)power. This was precisely because the water was uncooperative with those agencies, but cooperative with the Akwamu. The Akwamu interpreted the failure of rainfall in 2015, which led to insufficient hydro-power production, as a corresponding failure of state institutions to truly understand and respect the (hydro-)power of the water environment. The timing of rain was interpreted by Akwamu authorities as indexing the superior power wielded by the Akwamu gods over humans and, by extension, also of local Akwamu leaders compared to non-Akwamu national leaders due to their unique relationship with these gods.

Conclusion

The Akwamu purification ritual outlined above brings older and more contemporary theories of power and water infrastructure into a new conversation. Wittfogel’s classic argument that control of water translates into control of people is evidenced by the Ghanaian state’s sweeping claim to hydro-power. The dum sɔ crisis provides further support for such thinking. However, this ethnographic case study showed that Akwamu interpretations of water contest rather than reinforce state power and understandings of who has control over water, and ultimately, people.

In the case of Akwamu understandings of the Volta River’s power, Wittfogel’s assumption of links between human control, water resource management, and religion can be partly confirmed. The Akwamu believe in a hydro-sociality that intertwines human and non-human authority over, and relationships to, water. Such hydro-socialities – between spiritual beings as rooted in the environment and human custodians and beneficiaries of that environment – operate within a framework of power in which humans are not believed to dominate the (spiritual and natural) environment, but rather vice- (or even intra-)versa.

The Akwamu view the Volta’s water as imbued with specific spiritual power embodied in its material substance. Authority over water is linked to an understanding that the river is a resource for humans. The river can become a political tool for exercising authority over humans, and this authority is claimed by the Akwamu through a privileged and exclusively local relationship with these spirits who control the quantity and quality of water. Water’s absence and sudden return in the context of the Akwamu purification ritual unsettles state claims of human control and mastery over water through infrastructure.

Rather than harnessing water’s power through human-made infrastructure, Akwamu traditional leadership harnesses power through the assertion and maintenance of a relationship with the religious elements believed to control the water environment. In a sense, then, the Akwamu rely on a religious social structure, or alternate ‘infrastructure’ (Ertsen, cited in Bichsel, 2016: 367) in which Akwamu’s leaders become the artery through which other members of the group can access water’s divinity and potential blessings. The Odwira festival, in which the Volta’s religiously significant water ritually empowers the Akwamu paramount chief before reaching the people and the land in the form of blessings, is an evocative example of water as an index of power.

The case of Akwamu understandings of interlocked divine and human control over water as intersecting with national hydro-management complicates Wittfogel’s original model which sees water as potentially under absolute human control, in turn creating a political climate where close to absolute despotism can exist. While the state of Ghana, as originally led by Nkrumah, has also sought to index its authority over water through major infrastructural projects such as the Akosombo Dam, water’s inherent unpredictability and potential to be uncooperative can destabilise human assertions of absolute, or despotic, power over water and in turn over people. This instability of water is interpreted by Akwamu authorities as pointing to state failure to understand the true source of hydro-responsibility.

Returning to the opening story of the leaking tro tro, it seems water does elude absolute human control through infrastructure or other means. This has broader water management implications beyond that of the Accra tro tro, the Akosombo Dam and the Akwamu. Strang has cautioned that ‘analysing water issues from a narrowly “scientific” basis – and excluding other kinds of meanings – will not lead to the most effective form of management’ (2004: 114). Perhaps the key is to recognise and engage with local understandings of hydro-sociality and human–environment relationships that consider the slippery control of humans over nature, or even the very distinction between humans and natural as an inherently impartial, rather than absolute. In doing so, we may see in the fluid, unruly nature of water creative opportunities for local resistance, rather than reinforcement, of national or global claims to power over water and to work within such frameworks to counter effects such as climate change. Perhaps recognising that, for some people, cultivation (of a relationship with the divine) is believed to be the ultimate conservation (of the environment) may assist a shift in global and local states of power of people through power over water. This opens up the possibility, as recognised by Wittfogel in 1957, for water management solutions to incorporate notions of divine protectors in relationships with human responsibility to the environment, thus strengthening human intervention with a perceived to be greater (hydro-)power.