Peoples & NationsDagombaMossiMamprusiNanumbadocumented history
The Red Hunter and the Founding of Dagbon
The story begins with a man called Tohazie — the Red Hunter — a man of extraordinary strength and a complexion the tradition insists on naming.
Yendi, seat of the Ya-Naa; the Damba festival; the shrine of Naa Gbewaa at Pusiga in the Upper East.
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The Red Hunter and the Founding of Dagbon
The story begins with a man called Tohazie — the Red Hunter — a man of extraordinary strength and a complexion the tradition insists on naming.
He came from the east. In the best-known episode he arrives at a place where a village is being kept from its only water by a monstrous creature; he kills it, and the grateful people give him a wife, and from that marriage the line begins.
His son was Kpogonumbo, also a giant of a man, also a killer of monsters. And Kpogonumbo's son was Naa Gbewaa, and Gbewaa is where legend becomes state.
Gbewaa settled at Pusiga and his children founded kingdoms out of it. From one line came Mamprugu, the Mamprusi state at Nalerigu. From another, Dagbon, at Yendi. From another, Nanung, the Nanumba. And his daughter — Yennenga, who rode and fought and whose horse carried her north — bore a son called Ouedraogo, and from him came the Mossi kingdoms of what is now Burkina Faso. She has a national film prize named after her there.
Gbewaa's succession went wrong, as successions do: he passed over his eldest for a younger son, and the eldest killed the younger, and the kingdom split along the fracture. The three states that resulted are still there, still related, and still occasionally in dispute about what happened.
If you visit Ghana. Yendi, seat of the Ya-Naa; the Damba festival; the shrine of Naa Gbewaa at Pusiga in the Upper East.
The story begins with a man called Tohazie — the Red Hunter — a man of extraordinary strength and a complexion the tradition insists on naming.
He came from the east. In the best-known episode he arrives at a place where a village is being kept from its only water by a monstrous creature; he kills it, and the grateful people give him a wife, and from that marriage the line begins.
His son was Kpogonumbo, also a giant of a man, also a killer of monsters. And Kpogonumbo's son was Naa Gbewaa, and Gbewaa is where legend becomes state.
Gbewaa settled at Pusiga and his children founded kingdoms out of it. From one line came Mamprugu, the Mamprusi state at Nalerigu. From another, Dagbon, at Yendi. From another, Nanung, the Nanumba. And his daughter — Yennenga, who rode and fought and whose horse carried her north — bore a son called Ouedraogo, and from him came the Mossi kingdoms of what is now Burkina Faso. She has a national film prize named after her there.
Gbewaa's succession went wrong, as successions do: he passed over his eldest for a younger son, and the eldest killed the younger, and the kingdom split along the fracture. The three states that resulted are still there, still related, and still occasionally in dispute about what happened.