ABSTRACT
Polly Hill published Migrant Cocoa Farmers of Southern Ghana, in 1963. It looked at the movement of Ghanaian peasant farmers in the Eastern Region to acquire land on which to grow cocoa. She showed how the distribution of land of farmers differed among groups having different systems of inheritance and descent and she emphasised the circulatory nature of movement. Although the farmers spent considerable periods of time in the cocoa-growing areas, they built magnificent houses in their home towns, and their formal familial ties were focused around these towns. Funds from booming cocoa sales meant that children of migrants could be educated, an advantage in the increasingly bureaucratised and white-collar oriented society in the towns and cities of Ghana. It is in this sense of the maintenance of enduring links with a natal area and the eventual, hopefully triumphant, return to the natal area that circulatory movement is best understood in Southern Ghana. Polly Hill’s analysis did not however, extend to groups trying to participate in the cocoa boom in other areas of Ghana. In the centre of the Volta Region is Buem, another fertile cocoa-growing area. Like those west of the Volta, it attracted in-migrants from the surrounding areas. Some of these migrants were Avatimes whose traditional land is in the hills of the Togo Ranges, about twenty miles north of Ho, the regional capital.
