Gonja people

The Gonja are a Guan people who have been influenced by Dagbon, Akan, Mande and Hausa people. With the fall of the Songhai Empire (c. 1600), the Mande Ngbanya clan moved south, crossing the Black Volta and founding a city at Yagbum. The Gonja kingdom was originally divided into sections overseen by male siblings of Sumaila Ndewura Jakpa including their children and grandchildren.[1]

Under the leadership of Naba'a, the Ngbanya dynasty of Gonja was founded. The capital was established at Yagbum.[2]

The Ngbanya expanded rapidly, conquering several neighbors in the White Volta valley and beginning a profitable gold trade with the Akan states through nearby Begho. By 1675, the Gonja established a paramount chief, called the Yagbongwura, to control the kingdom. The Ngbanya dynasty has controlled this position from its founding to the present day, with only two brief interregnums. The current Yagbongwura, Bikunuto Jewu Soale I, has held his position since 2023.

Gonja chiefs and elders at the Volta River project travelling exhibition(1950)

Precolonial Gonja society was stratified into castes, with a ruling class, a Muslim trader class, an animist commoner class, and a slave class. Its economy depended largely on trade in slaves from Central Africa[3] and kola nuts, particularly through the market town of Salaga, sometimes called the "Timbuktu of the South."

The Gonja language, properly called Ngbanya or Ngbanyito,[4] is a Tano language within the Kwa languages family, closely related to Akan languages.[5]

• Rulers of the Northern state of Gonja

• Jack Goody, "The social organisation of the LoWiili", Oxford University Press, 1956
• Jack Goody, The Ethnology of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, West of the White Volta, 1958
• Jack Goody, Death, Property and the Ancestors: A study of the mortuary customs of the Lodagaa of West Africa, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1962
• Jack Goody and J.A. Braimah, "Salaga: The Struggle for Power", London, Longmans, 1967
• Jack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre, Oxford University Press, 1972
• Goody, Esther and Jack Goody. "The Circulation of Women and Children in Northern Ghana." Man, New Series. 2.2 (1967): 226-248.
• Wilks, Ivor. "Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries II: The Struggle for Trade." Journal of African History 23:4 (1982): 463-472.

• Ethnologue entry on Gonja language
• Gonja Association of North America
• Official website of the Gonja Association of Ghana