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Ghana THE PRECOLONIAL PERIOD
Unavailable
Figure 2. Asante Expansion and Major European Fortresses in the
Eighteenth Century
Source: Based on information from Daryll Forde and P. M. Kaberry,
eds., West African Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century,
London, 1967, 208; and Ivor G. Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth
Century, London, 1975, 19.
By the end of the sixteenth century, most ethnic groups
constituting the modern Ghanaian population had settled in their
present locations. Archeological remains found in the coastal zone
indicate that the area has been inhabited since the early Bronze
Age (ca. 4000 B.C.), but these societies, based on fishing in the
extensive lagoons and rivers, left few traces. Archeological work
also suggests that central Ghana north of the forest zone was
inhabited as early as 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Oral history and
other sources suggest that the ancestors of some of Ghana's
residents entered this area at least as early as the tenth century
A.D. and that migration from the north and east continued
thereafter.
These migrations resulted in part from the formation and
disintegration of a series of large states in the western Sudan
(the region north of modern Ghana drained by the Niger River).
Prominent among these Sudanic states was the Soninke kingdom of
Ghana. Strictly speaking, ghana was the title of the king,
but the Arabs, who left records of the kingdom, applied the term to
the king, the capital, and the state. The ninth-century Arab
writer, Al Yaqubi, described ancient Ghana as one of the three most
organized states in the region (the others being Gao and Kanem in
the central Sudan). Its rulers were renowned for their wealth in
gold, the opulence of their courts, and their warrior-hunting
skills. They were also masters of the trade in gold, which drew
North African merchants to the western Sudan. The military
achievements of these and later western Sudanic rulers and their
control over the region's gold mines constituted the nexus of their
historical relations with merchants and rulers of North Africa and
the Mediterranean.
Ghana succumbed to attacks by its neighbors in the eleventh
century, but its name and reputation endured. In 1957 when the
leaders of the former British colony of the Gold Coast sought an
appropriate name for their newly independent state--the first black
African nation to gain its independence from colonial rule--they
named their new country after ancient Ghana. The choice was more
than merely symbolic because modern Ghana, like its namesake, was
equally famed for its wealth and trade in gold.
Although none of the states of the western Sudan controlled
territories in the area that is modern Ghana, several small
kingdoms that later developed in the north of the country were
ruled by nobles believed to have immigrated from that region. The
trans-Saharan trade that contributed to the expansion of kingdoms
in the western Sudan also led to the development of contacts with
regions in northern modern Ghana and in the forest to the south. By
the thirteenth century, for example, the town of Jenné in the
empire of Mali had established commercial connections with the
ethnic groups in the savanna-woodland areas of the northern
two-thirds of the Volta Basin in modern Ghana. Jenné was also the
headquarters of the Dyula, Muslim traders who dealt with the
ancestors of the Akan speaking peoples who occupy most of the
southern half of the country.
The growth of trade stimulated the development of early Akan
states located on the trade route to the goldfields in the forest
zone of the south. The forest itself was thinly populated, but
Akan-speaking peoples began to move into it toward the end of the
fifteenth century with the arrival of crops from Southeast Asia and
the New World that could be adapted to forest conditions. These new
crops included sorghum, bananas, and cassava. By the beginning of
the sixteenth century, European sources noted the existence of the
gold-rich states of Akan and Twifu in the Ofin River Valley.
Also in the same period, some of the Mande who had stimulated
the development of states in what is now northern Nigeria (the
Hausa states and those of the Lake Chad area), moved southwestward
and imposed themselves on many of the indigenous peoples of the
northern half of modern Ghana and of Burkina Faso (Burkina--
formerly Upper Volta), founding the states of Dagomba and Mamprusi.
The Mande also influenced the rise of the Gonja state.
It seems clear from oral traditions as well as from
archeological evidence that the Mole-Dagbane states of Mamprusi,
Dagomba, and Gonja, as well as the Mossi states of Yatenga and
Wagadugu, were among the earliest kingdoms to emerge in modern
Ghana, being well established by the close of the sixteenth
century. The Mossi and Gonja rulers came to speak the languages of
the peoples they dominated. In general, however, members of the
ruling class retained their traditions, and even today some of them
can recite accounts of their northern origins.
Although the rulers themselves were not usually Muslims, they
either brought with them or welcomed Muslims as scribes and
medicine men, and Muslims also played a significant role in the
trade that linked southern with northern Ghana. As a result of
their presence, Islam substantially influenced the north. Muslim
influence, spread by the activities of merchants and clerics, has
been recorded even among the Asante to the south. Although most
Ghanaians retained their traditional beliefs, the Muslims brought
with them certain skills, including writing, and introduced certain
beliefs and practices that became part of the culture of the
peoples among whom they settled
(see Christianity and Islam in Ghana
, ch. 2).
In the broad belt of rugged country between the northern
boundaries of the Muslim-influenced states of Gonja, Mamprusi, and
Dagomba and the southernmost outposts of the Mossi kingdoms, lived
a number of peoples who were not incorporated into these entities.
Among these peoples were the Sisala, Kasena, Kusase, and Talensi,
agriculturalists closely related to the Mossi. Rather than
establishing centralized states themselves, they lived in so-called
segmented societies, bound together by kinship ties and ruled by
the heads of their clans. Trade between the Akan states to the
south and the Mossi kingdoms to the north flowed through their
homelands, subjecting them to Islamic influence and to the
depredations of these more powerful neighbors.
Of the components that would later make up Ghana, the state of
Asante was to have the most cohesive history and would exercise the
greatest influence. The Asante (also seen as
Ashanti--see Glossary)
are members of the Twi-speaking branch of the Akan people. The
groups that came to constitute the core of the Asante confederacy
moved north to settle in the vicinity of Lake Bosumtwi. Before the
mid-seventeenth century, the Asante began an expansion under a
series of militant leaders that led to the domination of
surrounding peoples and to the formation of the most powerful of
the states of the central forest zone.
Under Chief Oti Akenten (r. ca. 1630-60), a series of
successful military operations against neighboring Akan states
brought a larger surrounding territory into alliance with Asante.
At the end of the seventeenth century, Osei Tutu (d. 1712 or 1717)
became asantehene (king of Asante). Under Osei Tutu's rule,
the confederacy of Asante states was transformed into an empire
with its capital at Kumasi. Political and military consolidation
ensued, resulting in firmly established centralized authority. Osei
Tutu was strongly influenced by the high priest, Anokye, who,
tradition asserts, caused a stool of gold to descend from the sky
to seal the union of Asante states. Stools already functioned as
traditional symbols of chieftainship, but the Golden Stool of
Asante represented the united spirit of all the allied states and
established a dual allegiance that superimposed the confederacy
over the individual component states. The Golden Stool remains a
respected national symbol of the traditional past and figures
extensively in Asante ritual.
Osei Tutu permitted newly conquered territories that joined the
confederation to retain their own customs and chiefs, who were
given seats on the Asante state council. Tutu's gesture made the
process relatively easy and nondisruptive, because most of the
earlier conquests had subjugated other Akan peoples. Within the
Asante portions of the confederacy, each minor state continued to
exercise internal self-rule, and its chief jealously guarded the
state's prerogatives against encroachment by the central authority.
A strong unity developed, however, as the various communities
subordinated their individual interests to central authority in
matters of national concern.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Asante was a highly organized
state. The wars of expansion that brought the northern states of
Mamprusi, Dagomba, and Gonja under Asante influence were won during
the reign of Asantehene Opoku Ware I (d. 1750), successor to Osei
Tutu. By the 1820s, successive rulers had extended Asante
boundaries southward. Although the northern expansions linked
Asante with trade networks across the desert and in Hausaland to
the east, movements into the south brought the Asante into contact,
sometimes antagonistic, with the coastal Fante, Ga-Adangbe, and Ewe
peoples, as well as with the various European merchants whose
fortresses dotted the Gold Coast
(see
fig. 2).
Data as of November 1994
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