The Akan of the Bono country and Begho

Who rules

Title

No king attested. The Bono kingdom (Bonoman) of the later tradition has not been founded on most reckonings; the villages are led by the heads of the matrilineal clans (abusua) and the elders, with the priests of the earth and of the river god Tano

Since

Not applicable

Born

Not applicable

Family

The Akan reckon descent through the mother: each person belongs to a matrilineal clan (abusua). The later lists name seven or eight clans (Aduana, Agona, Asakyiri, Asenie, Asona, Bretuo, Ekuona, Oyoko). Which clans held the Bono country in 1200, and whether any lineage already ruled the others, is not known.

Confidence

low

The Bono tradition (Warren 1976; Meyerowitz 1958) makes Bono the first Akan state, founded when the people came out of the Amowi rock shelter near Pinihini under Ameyaa, whose son Asaman founded Yefri and then Bono Manso. Meyerowitz dated the founding to 1295 with a list of 37 rulers; Warren and others rejected the list. Effah-Gyamfi, who excavated Bono Manso, found it settled by the thirteenth century and a commercial and ritual centre by the fourteenth and fifteenth.

Wilks, Boahen and Garrard placed the rise of Bono in the fourteenth or fifteenth century with the opening of the gold trade. Wikipedia's Bono Manso page claims a founding about 1000 and its Akan people page cites Arhin (1979) for a polity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries: neither gives evidence for a ruler in 1200. We follow Effah-Gyamfi: no king can be shown on 1 January 1200.

Overlord

None. No outside power is known to take tribute from the Bono country in 1200. Ghana, the Sosso and Diara lie far to the north-west beyond the Mande country; Jenne's traders are not shown to reach here before the fourteenth century on most reckonings; the Mali empire, whose Wangara traders later settled in Begho, does not yet exist.

What the realm holds

• Begho (Bighu) near Hani: the trading town of the forest edge, its Bono quarter of Nyarko standing since the eleventh century
• The farming villages of the Bono country around Tano Boase, Bono Manso (if settled), Techiman (Takyiman) and Wenchi
• The Amowi rock shelters near Pinihini and the shrine of the river god Tano (Taa Kora) near Tano Boase, the holy places of the Bono origin tradition
• Iron smelting sites of the Bono country, worked since the first millennium AD (Effah-Gyamfi)

How it was acquired

Not a conquest state. The Akan of the Bono country grew out of the farming peoples of the forest edge; Shinnie and Shinnie (1995) found no evidence for the older theories of a migration from Ghana or the Sahara, and Boahen and Konadu reject them too.

Allies and rivals

None recorded. Begho's neighbours are the Kulango and Lorhon peoples to the west and north-west, the peoples of the central savanna to the north across the Black Volta, the Guan of the middle Volta to the east and the forest villages of Adanse and the Pra to the south: all govern themselves. Ameyaw (1979) says Begho was never politically subject to the later Bono king, which suggests the town ran its own affairs from the start.

The realm that morning

Begho governs itself under the heads of its quarters (names not known). The Bono villages are independent communities under their elders. To the south the forest Akan of Adanse, Asantemanso and the earthworks of the Pra and Birim are separate peoples with no common ruler (drawn as peoples). To the north, beyond the Black Volta, live Gur and Guan-speaking peoples under earth priests; no Dagomba, Mamprusi or Gonja state stands.

No Mande state rules any of this ground.

Wealth

Farming (yams and oil palm; maize and cassava, American crops, are centuries away), hunting and the forest trade; iron working; pottery. Gold: the forest and the Black Volta country hold rich gold, but when it began to be dug for trade to the north is disputed. Garrard dated the earliest Akan gold weights to about 1400 and, with Wilks, placed the opening of the Akan goldfields to the trans-Saharan trade in the late fourteenth century; Posnansky, Crossland and Konadu argue for an earlier trade through Begho, from about 1100.

On 1 January 1200 some gold and kola may already travel north from Begho, but no source shows it. Begho's famous brass working, ironworking (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) and its Arabic-inscribed basins are later.

Military

No army, fortress or war is recorded. The villages would defend themselves with bows, spears and iron-tipped weapons; there were no horses in the forest. The earthworks of the southern forest, which might have had a defensive role, lie outside the Bono country.

Threats

• None known in 1200: no raiding state is attested on any side
• Horse-borne raiding from the north begins only with the Mossi, Dagomba and later Gonja states of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

In 1200

1. Dry season, December 1199 to March 1200The trading and farming season of the forest edge: the yam harvest is in, and Begho receives whatever traders come from the north and from the forest.Depends on: Nothing in play. Stopped by: Nothing likely.

Later, on the likely course

1. Thirteenth century (Effah-Gyamfi); 1295 in Meyerowitz's rejected chronologyBono Manso grows into the seat of the first Bono rulers. Not an event of 1200: it gives the direction of the century.Depends on: The growth of the Bono villages and of trade. Stopped by: Play that diverts trade or brings war to the forest edge.
2. About 1250 in the Fante tradition (Mankessim founded 1252)The people later called Fante leave the Bono country (Krako, near Techiman) for the coast. A traditional date, not evidence.Depends on: The tradition's chronology, which is not reliable. Stopped by: Nothing in 1200.

Places of note

• Begho: The trading town of the forest edge, Bono quarter standing since the eleventh century
• Bono Manso: Later royal town of Bono; settled by the thirteenth century (Effah-Gyamfi)
• Amowi rock shelters and the Tano shrine (Taa Kora): Holy places of the Bono origin tradition; position approximate

Where the sources disagree

• The dating of Bono's founding runs from the eleventh century (Wikipedia's Bono Manso page, unsourced; Arhin 1979 as cited on the Akan people page) through 1295 (Meyerowitz, rejected by Warren 1976) to the fourteenth or fifteenth century (Wilks, Boahen, Garrard). Effah-Gyamfi's excavation has the town settled by the thirteenth century. We write no state on 1 January 1200.
• Begho's Mande (Wangara or Dyula) Muslim quarter (Kramo) is not dated to 1200 in anything we read; Wikipedia's Begho page dates the Jula town to the fifteenth century (Massing 2000) while its Akan people page has Begho a major commercial town by the thirteenth century (Posnansky 2015).
• Ahmad Baba and the Ta'rikh al-Sudan (seventeenth century) speak of the gold of Bitu, which Wilks identified with Begho: that is evidence for the later trade, not for 1200.
• For the campaign's gold question: on the dominant view the West African gold that reached the Almohad and Egyptian mints in 1200 came from Bambuk and Bure on the upper Senegal and Niger (the gold land of the Wangara in al-Idrisi, 1154, lies there), not from the Akan forest, whose goldfields joined the trans-Saharan trade about 1400 (Garrard, Wilks). The Black Volta gold round Loropéni may have been worked earlier (the walls there are at least a thousand years old by the UNESCO listing), but no source ties it to the northern trade in 1200.

Evidence: No written source describes this ground before the Portuguese reached the coast in 1471. The record rests on archaeology (Posnansky's excavations at Begho 1970-1979; Effah-Gyamfi at Bono Manso; Boachie-Ansah and others at the Amowi rock shelters) and on Bono oral tradition recorded in the twentieth century.

On the map: Drawn as the ground of the first Akan villages and of the Begho town, not as a state. Everything else in the Akan forest is drawn as self-governing peoples.

Primary sources for this realm

Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.

• Ife, Benin, Nri, the Yoruba towns and the Akan: archaeology and recorded tradition (no contemporary text; traditions written down from the 1890s). No text of any kind exists for the forest belt in 1200.