By Dzodzi Tsikata. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006; pp. 439. 79€. ISBN 9004141448. Reviewed by Lynne Brydon, University of Birmingham. ©Lynne Brydon, 2008.
This is the published version of a 2003 Leiden doctorate focusing on the problems faced by Ghanaian riverine communities living downstream from the Volta (also known as Akosombo) Dam since its construction in the early 1960s and its official opening by President Nkrumah in 1966. There is much here of interest, in particular, detailed empirical information on livelihoods in the communities and their migrant extensions around the lake, and also material from locally sourced interviews with retired Volta River Authority (VRA) personnel. However, in terms of a published work it could have benefited from judicious pruning.
After a detailed discussion of concepts and methodological approaches, the next almost 150 pages deal with the history and politics of the dam's funding, construction and plans for resettlement of displaced communities and environmental impacts. While there is a very great deal of detail given here, the analysis and discussion is limited: perhaps greater reference to, use and critique of Ronnie Graham's 1982 book would have enabled the author both to foreground crucial broader political factors relevant to the dam's planning and funding, at the same time, allowing cuts through the use of cross-referencing. What we are presented with is a welter of minute detail, relevant in terms of thesis background, but not reader-friendly.
However, the stated focus of the work are the fates of members of the Tongu Ewe communities downstream from the dam and also of communities, mostly originally derived from Tongu, who migrated upstream, either seasonally or for longer periods, in the years before the dam was built, and whose descendants are now members of lakeside communities. While the author sets out and critiques the VRA's plans (and their implementation) for resettlement and compensation for community sites and lands inundated by the lake, she points out that the communities downstream that are the subjects of her study effectively received no compensation. What has happened in the years since the dam's construction is a falling of overall river levels and the cessation of the annual floods just after the rainy season which have meant a series of changes for the worse in overall income (for example, the demise of the clam picking/ cultivation industry), and in health hazards as pollutants remain in the soil and have built up over the years. The author shows very effectively and in a gender sensitive way how these and other factors have affected lives and livelihoods of the downstream communities.
When she turns to look at the Volta Lakeside communities that have developed since the inundation, however, the dynamics of relationships between Tongu members of these communities and those downstream are less clear. The same kinds of meticulous and gender aware data are presented but the strengths and significances of links with ‘home’ areas are fuzzier. While, in pre-dam days, fishing upstream was a lucrative stage in many young men's lives, either annually, or on a more permanent basis, now the seasonality prompting the move upstream is non-existent: the basis for forging and maintaining links between the lakeside and downstream communities has been suborned. There are so much empirical data presented in the four penultimate chapters that it is impossible to do justice to them. What seems to be happening is that the downstream communities are now indistinguishable from most other impoverished rural riverine communities, while those upstream still depend on fishing supplemented by subsistence farming, and in some cases seem to be being left behind by more recent arrivals from coastal fishing groups. Any implications from this data are not effectively drawn out in the four chapters and the concluding chapter is, in the classic ‘social-science-dissertation’ sense of the term, simply a summary of key points.
Overall it is not really possible to present a summary review of the book: it engages with issues on too many fronts. While I think that a more politically nuanced discussion of all aspects of the dam would be of greater benefit, it really wouldn't fit here. This is not the main thrust of the book, rather a kind of huge tangent that takes us is into another direction, a direction that Graham has already accessed and which could well be incorporated here. Where it does well is in the empirical data collection and presentation, but apart from the admittedly crucial fact that the building of the dam caused massive and life-changing (and uncompensated) changes for Tongu people, the dam could recede into the background. This would allow the consequences and implications from the data to emerge and to be framed, perhaps in terms of the livelihoods framework set out in the first chapter, and contribute more effectively to the sociological/ anthropological analysis and understanding of contemporary Ghana and beyond.