The wide wooded savanna inside the great bend of the Black Volta, from Bole and the Bui gorge to the White Volta at Daboya.
The Gonja kingdom that later ruled it was founded by Mande horsemen in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, so it does not exist in 1200. Before it the land was held by small Gur-speaking peoples (the Vagla, Tampulma, Safalba, Chakali and the Mo or Deg) and by Guan speakers, whose language the later Gonja rulers adopted. Daboya on the White Volta made salt from saline springs and has a long archaeological record (Shinnie and Kense).
On 1 January 1200 these are villages under earth priests, with no ruler over them.
Who holds it
- Title
- Earth priests and lineage heads of each village
- Since
- Not known
- Confidence
- low
How things stand that morning
Independent villages; no lord and no raiding recorded.
Customs
The earth priest (in the later regional terms tindana or tendaana), descended from the first settlers, allots land and keeps the earth shrines; lineage heads settle disputes; farming of sorghum, millet and yams; hunting; salt at Daboya.
Assemblies
Village elders and earth priests.
Where the sources disagree
Evidence: Later ethnography and linguistic distribution; Daboya's excavation; no written source.
On the map: Drawn from the later Gonja country; its 1200 peoples are named from later distributions.
Sources and studies
- P. Shinnie and F. Kense, Archaeology of Gonja, Ghana: Excavations at Daboya (1989); from the researcher's knowledge, not checked in this session
- Researcher's general knowledge of the ethnography and linguistic geography of Ghana and Togo (present-day distributions), used only to place peoples whose 1200 seats are not recorded
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.