Ghana - Pre-Colonial Coastal States
Archaeological remains found in the coastal zone indicate that the area has been inhabited since the early Bronze Age (ca. 4000 BC), but these societies, based on fishing in the extensive lagoons and rivers, left few traces. Archaeological work also suggests that central Ghana north of the forest zone was inhabited as early as 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Oral history and other sources suggest that the ancestors of some of Ghana's residents entered this area at least as early as the tenth century AD and that migration from the north and east continued thereafter.
The growth of trade stimulated the development of early Akan states located on the trade route to the goldfields in the forest zone of the south. The forest itself was thinly populated, but Akan-speaking peoples began to move into it toward the end of the fifteenth century with the arrival of crops from Southeast Asia and the New World that could be adapted to forest conditions. These new crops included sorghum, bananas, and cassava.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, European sources noted the existence of the gold-rich states of Akan and Twifu in the Ofin River Valley. Also in the same period, some of the Mande, who had stimulated the development of states in what is now northern Nigeria (the Hausa states and those of the Lake Chad area), moved southwestward and imposed themselves on many of the indigenous peoples of the northern half of modern Ghana and of Burkina Faso (Burkina—formerly Upper Volta), founding the states of Dagomba and Mamprusi. The Mande also influenced the rise of the Gonja state.
When the whole Gold Coast was under the emperor of Benin and governed by kings appointed by him, there was peace throughout the whole extent of the country. But after the arrival of the Portuguese and the immigration of the Tshi tribes the unity was dissolved; hence toward the end of the seventeenth century there were eleven powerful states or kingdoms on the Coast, besides those in the interior. They are, according to Bosman, Axim, Ante or Ahanta, Adom, Gabi, Kommani, Afutu, Sabu (Asabu), Fante, Akron or Gomoa, Agona, and Akwamu. The kingdom of Akra had already been destroyed by the Akwamus, hence the eleven states mentioned; else they would be twelve.
One of the most important is the Akan, who live in the coastal savannah and forest zones of southern Ghana. The Akan were living in well-defined states by the early sixteenth century at the latest. By the end of that century, the states of Mamprusi, Dagomba, and Gonja had come into being among the Mole-Dagbane peoples of northern Ghana. These peoples and states were significantly influenced by Mande-speaking peoples from the north and the northeast.
As early as the end of the sixteenth century most of the ethnic groups constituting the Ghanaian population at independence in 1957 had settled in their present locations. The centuries preceding full British control of the area in the late nineteenth century were marked, however, by the formation, expansion, and contraction of a number of African states, which often entailed the movement of groups of people from outside the territory or from one place to another within it.
In part, the processes of state formation and development were directly or indirectly influenced by attempts to participatein, or to control, trade with the Europeans who began to come to the coast as early as the fifteenth century. To a considerable extent, however, the growth or decline of these states and the relations among them were responses to patterns of trade, particularly between north and south, that preceded European incursion and to internal dynamics peculiar to the states themselves.
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