ABSTRACT
To describe adequately the present political structure of the Ga ‘towns’ it is necessary to consider their development during the last 250 years. Until about the end of the seventeenth century, the Ga-speaking people, part aborigines, part immigrants (see ‘History and Traditions of Origin’, p. 67) formed discrete settlements of extended families, whose priestly heads (wulomei), assisted by hunters, were their only leaders. These farming settlements then gathered together in groups for mutual protection and set up military organizations, which they copied from the neighbouring Akwamu and Fanti (see p. 67). The priest-leaders remained the heads of civil affairs, and in each man one became head priest, his lineage god, usually a lagoon god of the aborigines, becoming the acknowledged god of the whole ‘town’. The hunters became ‘captains’ (asafoatsemei) in the new military organization (asafo). When warfare ceased and the population greatly increased the asafoatsemei took over the management of secular affairs, and today they really run the ‘town’, though the priests (wulomei) remain ritual heads with considerable prestige.
