Gonja

An ethnic group of diverse origins in modern-day northwestern Ghana and northeastern Cote d’Ivoire, the Gonja established a powerful trading kingdom in the 17th century but were conquered by the Asante in the 18th century.

Founded in the mid-16th century by a cavalry force of the declining but expansionistic Mali Empire, the Gonja’s origins were based on conquest. Gonja’s first ruler, Nabaga (“the one who arrived”), established the new kingdom’s capital at Yagbum. The descendants of the Malian cavalrymen, called Ngbanya, formed a chiefly class overseeing the diverse territories the Gonja kingdom encompassed. The indigenous peoples of the region became a commoner class, the nyamasi, but retained ritual control over their lands through their land priests. As in the neighboring Mossi kingdom, the indigenous traditions survived the period of conquest, but unlike the Mossi, the Gonja began as an Islamic state.

Located in the geographical interstice between the growing Mossi and Akan kingdoms, the Gonja continued their expansionist tradition throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. These so called Gonja wars increased the Gonja territory to the Oti River (in the far eastern part of present-day Ghana and part of the Volta River basin), effectively isolating the Akan peoples who founded the powerful Asante kingdom from the Mossi kingdoms until the middle of the 18th century. Dynastic struggles in the late 17th century left the Gonja weakened and susceptible to invasion by the Asante in the mid-18th century.

Further reading: “Gonja,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 845; “The Peoples,” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of Africa, eds. Roland Oliver and Michael Crowder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 57-86; Ivor Wilks, “The Mossi and the Akan States, 1400-1800,” in F. J. Ade Ajiya and Michael Crowder, eds., History of West Africa, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1985), 465-502.

—Lisa M. Brady