By the end of the 16th Century, most ethnic groups constituting
the modern Ghanaian population had settled in their present locations.
Archaeological 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. Archaeological 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 Ancient 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 9th Century Arab writer, Al Yaqubi,
described ancient Ghana as one of the three most organised 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 neighbours 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 emigrated 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 13th Century, for example,
the town of Jenné in the empire of Mali had established commercial
connections with the ethnic groups in the savannah 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 15th
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 16th
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 south-westward 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 archaeological
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 16th Century. The Mossi and Gonja rulers
came to speak the languages of the people 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
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 centralised
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
neighbours.
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 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 Bosumtwe. Before the mid-17th 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 a series of successful military operations
against neighbouring Akan states brought a larger surrounding territory
into alliance with Asante. At the end of the 17th Century,
Osei Tutu 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 centralised 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. Osei Tutu's gesture made the
process relatively easy and non-disruptive, 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-18th Century, Asante was a highly organised
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 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 people, as well as with the
various European merchants whose fortresses dotted the Gold Coast
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