Green Gold and Guarded Forests: Forestry, Conservation, and Land in Ghana

Long before modern forest departments drew reserve boundaries on maps, Ghana's forest belt was already a managed landscape. Akan, Guan, Ewe, Nzema, Sefwi, Aowin, and other communities farmed, hunted, gathered medicine, protected sacred groves, and regulated access through stools, clans, and ritual authority. Forests were not empty wilderness. They were farms in fallow, ancestral burial places, hunting grounds, watersheds, paths to markets, and sources of building material, fuelwood, dyes, raffia, chewing sticks, and healing plants.

The rise of cocoa from the late nineteenth century changed the forest frontier. Farmers cleared land for cocoa in Akyem, Akuapem, Ashanti, Brong, Western, and later parts of the Volta and Central regions. Migrant farmers, especially from older cocoa areas, negotiated land through abusa and abunu tenancy arrangements. Chiefs and landholding families gained rent and political influence. This expansion made Ghana one of the world's great cocoa producers, but it also intensified pressure on closed forests.

The timber trade added another layer. Mahogany, odum, sapele, wawa, and other species became valuable exports as railways and roads reached the interior. European firms and local contractors cut timber for mines, harbours, rail sleepers, furniture, and export markets. By the early twentieth century, colonial officials began to speak of scientific forestry, but local people often saw the same policy as a new form of state control over land they had long used.