The Oti valley and the hills round Bassar, west of the main Atakora chain.
The Konkomba, a people of segmentary clans with no chiefs, and the Bassar, famous later for their iron, hold this ground in later times. Iron was smelted round Bassar in the Early Iron Age (about 545 BC to AD 132 by radiocarbon at Dekpassanware), and then the furnaces fell silent: de Barros and his colleagues find ironworking reappearing only in the thirteenth century and growing fast after the mid-sixteenth, when Bassar iron fed regional and long-distance trade. On 1 January 1200 the hills are therefore at a low point, just before the revival.
Ground east of the crest (Kara, Sokodé) belongs to the next map.
Who holds it
- Title
- Clan elders and earth priests
- Since
- Not known
- Confidence
- low
How things stand that morning
Independent communities.
Customs
Clans and lineages without chiefs; earth shrines; smithing (smelting revives here in the thirteenth century).
Assemblies
Clan elders.
Where the sources disagree
Evidence: Later ethnography; the radiocarbon-dated archaeology of Bassar iron (de Barros, Iles, Frame and Killick 2020).
On the map: Drawn from the later Konkomba and Bassar lands.
Sources and studies
- P. de Barros, L. Iles, L. D. Frame and D. Killick, The early iron metallurgy of Bassar, Togo: furnaces, metallurgical remains and iron objects, Azania 55 (2020)
- 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.