ABSTRACT
The portrait of rural livelihoods presented here is drawn from the study of Bawku East District in Ghana’s far northeast corner. Bordering Togo to the east and Burkina Faso to the north, Bawku East is an international and ethnic border zone encompassing the trading center of Bawku and numerous smaller towns, villages, and satellite markets. Whitehead aptly describes the district as “an ethnically mixed area which has functioned as a refuge area for many generations of rural migrants” (1984a: 3). The inhabitants of Bawku are primarily Kusasi, an ethnic group related to the Tallensi and exhibiting a similar acephalous social structure (Manoukian 1951). Bawku also hosts a large population ethnically identified with the Mamprussi state, a polity sharing a common origin with the Mossi and Dagomba (Manowkian 1951). With much social interchange and cultural overlap (including intermarriage and mutually intelligible languages), and at the same time a history of animosity, Kusasi and Mamprussi ethnic differentiations are not always clear-cut-but are sometimes all too clear (Bening 1975b: 130; Drucker-Brown 1988-1989; Smith 2001).1
