ABSTRACT
The LoWiili live on the banks of the Black Volta, concentrated mainly in the settlement of Birifu; others live immediately across the river in the Ivory Coast. Most of the Lobi and Dagari-speaking peoples practise a form of shifting cultivation. Their main farms he at some distance from the compounds and are cropped for three or four years and then abandoned for another seven to ten years. In the Northern Territories the individualisation of farming rights tends to increase with the density of the population. Western Gonja, with a density of four persons per square mile and a shifting agriculture, is "marked by an absence of an idea of ownership of a right to use land linked and bound permanently to a particular parcel of the land"; only "land actually under cultivation" is the subject of succession. LoWiili are typical of the northern parts, where a dense population requires a more precise systematization.
