He came from the north, and he came because he was broke.
Damongo, seat of the Yagbonwura; Old Buipe; Salaga; the Jakpa Palace.
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Ndewura Jakpa and the Making of Gonja
He came from the north, and he came because he was broke.
Sumaila Ndewura Jakpa was a Mande cavalryman out of the Mali world — a trader whose business had failed. He went to a soothsayer, and the soothsayer told him his fortune was not in his own country: it lay south, in a land he had not seen. So he raised men and horses and rode down out of the Sahel into the country between the White and Black Voltas in the early seventeenth century.
His name means, near enough, conqueror with the spear. He began at Ntereso-Bonfu, where the tradition says he faced and defeated a powerful shrine priest, and from there he took the country in stages, and as he took it he put his own kinsmen and captains over each division. What resulted was not a tight kingdom but a federation of divisions, each with its own chief, rotating the paramountcy among ruling houses — a constitution that still governs the Gonja today.
He did not build it on one people. Muslim scholars, Hausa traders, Bariba, the peoples already on the land — all were given place, and this deliberate breadth is what Gonja tradition praises him for above his victories. The Muslim clerics who came with and after him gave Gonja something rare in the region: a written chronicle, the Kitab Ghanja, kept in Arabic.
He died of a wound taken fighting the Asante near Yeji, on the road, trying to reach his sister's burial place. He is buried at Old Buipe.
Gonja's great markets, Salaga above all, grew on the routes he secured. The federation he shaped still carries the memory of a founder who made room for many peoples.
If you visit Ghana. Damongo, seat of the Yagbonwura; Old Buipe; Salaga; the Jakpa Palace.
He came from the north, and he came because he was broke.
Sumaila Ndewura Jakpa was a Mande cavalryman out of the Mali world — a trader whose business had failed. He went to a soothsayer, and the soothsayer told him his fortune was not in his own country: it lay south, in a land he had not seen. So he raised men and horses and rode down out of the Sahel into the country between the White and Black Voltas in the early seventeenth century.
His name means, near enough, conqueror with the spear. He began at Ntereso-Bonfu, where the tradition says he faced and defeated a powerful shrine priest, and from there he took the country in stages, and as he took it he put his own kinsmen and captains over each division. What resulted was not a tight kingdom but a federation of divisions, each with its own chief, rotating the paramountcy among ruling houses — a constitution that still governs the Gonja today.
He did not build it on one people. Muslim scholars, Hausa traders, Bariba, the peoples already on the land — all were given place, and this deliberate breadth is what Gonja tradition praises him for above his victories. The Muslim clerics who came with and after him gave Gonja something rare in the region: a written chronicle, the Kitab Ghanja, kept in Arabic.
He died of a wound taken fighting the Asante near Yeji, on the road, trying to reach his sister's burial place. He is buried at Old Buipe.
Gonja's great markets, Salaga above all, grew on the routes he secured. The federation he shaped still carries the memory of a founder who made room for many peoples.