Originally from Tamale, Ghana, Saibu Mutaru is currently a Lisa Maskell Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, Stellenbosch University (South Africa) where he pursues a PhD programme in Social Anthropology. His research, which focuses on the anthropological investigation of the economy of ‘witch camps’ in the Northern region of Ghana, is being supervised by Dr. Thomas Cousins. Saibu’s research interests include economic anthropology, anthropology of development and witchcraft.

Abstract
This paper seeks to discuss two ethical dilemmas that I encountered during the time of my fieldwork in Northern Ghana. These two ethical dilemmas could be presented hypothetically and metaphorically in the form of questions as follows: How legitimate and ethical is it for a researcher to gain access to data provided by a child with the consent of only the mother and not the father in a patriarchal society? Secondly, how must we surmount the ethical problem involving a case where a “consecrated informant” speaks not by himself but through multiple voices all claiming to represent the opinion of the informant?