Kingdom of Ghana

6 Key excerpts on "Kingdom of Ghana"

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  Colonial Legacies and the Rule of Law in Africa

  Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe

  • Salmon A Shomade, Salmon A. Shomade(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3.2 for current maps) is different from the Ghana Empire extensively discussed in the history books. The Ghana Empire was one of the three major empires (the other two were the Mali Empire and the Songhai Empire) that dominated the western part of the African Sahel during the 5th and 16th centuries. The western part of the Sahel was also referred to as the Sudan Region. Flourishing during the 5th and 11th centuries, the Ghana Empire was mostly situated in parts of present-day Mauritania and Mali. Populated by the Soninke ethnic group (a subgroup of the larger Mande-speaking ethnic group), the Empire served as intermediaries between North Africa’s Arab traders and African ivory and gold producers south of the Sudan Region. Becoming prosperous from its trading prowess, the Empire expanded its political control over smaller Sudanese kingdoms and incorporated many of the gold-producing kingdoms under its control. The Ghana Empire began declining in the 11th century and was eventually absorbed into the emerging and increasingly powerful Mali Empire, which occupied the same area of the Sahel.

  In its present form, the Republic of Ghana, as an independent nation, came into being in 1957. It is located in West Africa and bordered by Cote D’Ivoire on the west, Togo on the east, Burkina Faso on the north, and the Atlantic Ocean on the south. However, historians and archaeologists have documented that people lived on the land constituting present-day Ghana as far back as 50,000 bce .2 The early Ghanaian dwellers primarily engaged in specialized farming and hunting that enabled them to increase their population and settlements over the land. They utilized communal labor for forest clearance and other difficult tasks that required hard labor. Historians note that for adequately addressing dominant issues of the time such as diseases, governance, land, and settlements, these early dwellers created great cultural and sociopolitical structures. These inhabitants also had a spiritual culture that was connected “to the ecological cycles of the forest and its fringes and sacred ancestral sites.”3

  Archaeological data have also established that by the 4th-century iron technology development profoundly shaped the lives of the people living on Ghanaian soil. Utilizing the tools afforded by the iron technology, the people found it easier to farm rainforest areas consisting of dense vegetation. In later centuries, the technology also enabled the development of centralized specialization and urbanization, as well as propelled gold mining as a major economic force. Among the early centralized kingdoms was the Gonja Kingdom, which, historians claimed, flourished during the 16th century and during this period had trading routes and economic influences in many parts of Ghana. Historians claim that Gonja founders might have been immigrant settlers or invaders from outside Ghana who seized land from the initial land settlers. While many of these invaders were not Muslims, they were exposed to Islam prior to migrating to Ghana and brought some of the Islamic cultural practices with them to many regions of the country as they settled among the indigenous populations.

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  The History of Ghana

  • Roger S. Gocking(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  2 Precolonial States and Societies PREHISTORY There have been many hypotheses to explain the origins of the present people of Ghana. British anthropologist Eve Meyerowitz and Ghanaian nationalist Dr. J. B. Danquah have suggested that the Akan migrated from the ancient empire of Ghana. Danquah was tirelessly to champion this theory, and it was very much on account of his efforts that when the Gold Coast became independent in 1957 the country changed its name to Ghana. The nineteenth-century Ghanaian historian Dr. Carl C. Reindorf has suggested that the Ga came to Ghana from Benin. Others have men- tioned Togo, Dahomey, Yorubaland, and even the Biblical land of Canaan as points of origin. However, as one archaeologist has observed, "Ghana has a fairly long prehistory, probably going back to around 50,000 B.C.," and these Stone Age ancestors "bequeathed to Ghana a legacy of human population on which the future population of the country was to be built." 1 Not until about 10,000 B.C.E., with the flourishing of what has been identified as the Kintampo culture, does the archeological record become extensive and precise. Many of the sites associated with this culture have been found in the vicinity of the present-day market town of Kintampo 18 The History of Ghana in the Brong-Ahafo Region, about 90 miles north of Kumasi. Significant technological changes in tool making, especially the fashioning of small implements, were followed by pottery making, and eventually by animal raising, farming, and village community life. Somewhere between the third and the second millennium, cattle, sheep, and goats were domesti- cated, and shortly afterward food plants like cowpeas, hackberry, oil palms, and white and yellow yams (Dioscorea sp.). Significantly, Kintampo culture was not restricted to the savanna, where it probably first emerged, but so far over 16 sites have been excavated in the savanna grassland and woodland as well as further south into areas of the rain forest.

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  International Businesses and the Challenges of Poverty in the Developing World

  Case Studies on Global Responsibilities and Practices

  • F. Bird, S. Herman, F. Bird, S. Herman(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  64 3 A Political and Economic History of Ghana, 1957–2003 Bill Buenar Puplampu Introduction Ghana lies along the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. It has a population of about 20 million in 10 administrative regions. The capital is Accra, with pop- ulation of about 2 million. The country is named after the old West African Empire of that name which flourished some 600 miles north. The 250-mile- long coastline is dotted with more than 100 castles and forts, testifying to a long history of Western interest and involvement. The first Europeans to set foot on the shore, around 1475, were the Portuguese. They built their first castle in 1482 and named the region ‘Gold Coast’ for the vast quantities of gold they found. They were followed by the Dutch, the Danes, the English and the Swedes. The castles and forts served variously as slave posts, trading posts, army garrisons, colonial residences and territorial markers. By the 1850s, only the Dutch and British were left. When the Dutch withdrew in 1874, the British proceeded to make the Gold Coast a Crown colony. At the time, the Asante were a dominant political and empire force in the central and forest regions of the area. A proud and warlike people steeped in tradi- tion, custom and wealth, the Asante were not subdued easily. The British made friends with more compliant coastal peoples such as the Gas and Fantes. Between 1817 and 1896, several wars, negotiations and treaties between the British and various Asante kings brought the Asantes into par- tial submission, and their king was exiled to the Seychelles. For the next 50 years, the British enjoyed colonial control, and exploited natural resources such as timber and gold. By the late 1940s, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the drum- beats for political independence were beginning to sound in the Gold Coast. The country achieved independence in 1957 and was renamed Ghana. Its independence ushered in a wave of other liberations from colonial rule across Africa.

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  Engaging with a Legacy: Nehemia Levtzion (1935-2003)

  • E. Ann McDougall(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  versus slipped and ribbed) suggest different sets of cultural interactions and influences and merit considerably more study. At present, the Hawd-MSV connections seem to develop relatively late. Prior to these connections, the MSV sites remain quite small and undifferentiated with a very limited material culture repertoire through much of the first millennium CE. Without further research to explore different sectors of the MSV and to extend the excavated sequence into the tenth century and beyond, there is little more we can say about the development of Takrur. The Middle Niger presents quite a contrast, with sites such as Jenne-jeno and Ja reaching considerable sizes early on and displaying a diverse material culture reflecting influences and interactions over a wide area. Although these sites are, as previously noted, distant from the political center of Ghana, they provide insights into the systems of trade and interaction in the first millennium CE that may have been linked to Kumbi Saleh. At Kumbi Saleh itself, however, the present paucity of excavated deposits dating prior to the ninth century CE severely constrains our interpretations of its chronological depth and development.

  Political Organization

  Given the state of the evidence just outlined, any discussion of the development and political organization of early Sudanic polities must be both theoretical and speculative. Two post-Ancient Ghana and Mali developments that are especially important for this effort are the documentation of indigenous inter-regional trade and town growth in the early first millennium CE and an increased understanding of the organizational variability of complex societies. These make it possible to theorize the internal dynamics of emerging Ghana and also to contemplate a range of possible organizational structures for the historical Ghana of al-Bakri that move us away from uncritical analogies with kingdoms and empires in other, better-known parts of the world.

  Ancient Ghana and Mali

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  The Lord's Prayer in the Ghanaian Context

  A Reception-Historical Study

  • Michael Wandusim(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  548 to gain public visibility and compete for adherents as stated earlier and as will be later discussed. Moreover, in the discussion of Christianity below, the fact will be established that these political developments and the economic part did receive and indeed still receive an indispensable contribution from religious groups especially the churches in Ghana.

  These political credentials set Ghana out as the pride of Africa in democratic terms. That does not, however, save it from the monstrous canker named as corruption which largely explains the level of poverty in the country despite the available material resources. For, economically, the country is considered a low middle-income country with a total GDP of 45.50 billion US Dollars549 with agriculture, partly mechanised, as one of the main contributors to the GDP, for it employs about half of the workforce. Even though the country is endowed with great reserves of natural resources like gold (that is why the colonial government named it Gold Coast in colonial times), diamond, crude oil, bauxite, manganese, timber, etc. and cash crops such as cocoa (Ghana and Ivory Coast are world leading producers of cocoa), cashew, etc., many Ghanaians are still under the poverty line: the 2013 estimates pegged it at twenty-four percent (24 %) of the population with youth unemployment forming about eleven percent (11 %) as at 2013.

  Taking together, this section provides a picture (albeit not exhaustive) of the political and economic spheres of Ghana within which Christians in Ghana negotiate on daily basis their faith in God through Jesus. And it is important to have this in mind as together with the socio-religious background it shapes the Christian context itself and by extension how people read holy scripture. And that is the point of the presentation of those two broad contextual factors in Ghana.

  3.4  Christianity in Ghana

  Christianity in Ghana predates the Ghanaian state itself and it is also multi-faced. This section will therefore discuss Christianity in Ghana generally and subsequently pay attention to the initially stated three major Christian streams.

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  An Introduction to African Politics

  • Alex Thomson(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This case study will need to leave the rich detail of these substantial empires to the historians, but to give a sense of the complex social and political structures that underwrote these entities, it is worth briefly highlighting just how prosperous these states were. Political power was broadcast through well-equipped armies, well- appointed and secure trading markets, competent structures of government and bureaucracy, and impressive capital cities. These commanding state institutions came at a price, but this bill was easily met. In the first instance, rulers were able to rely on good agricultural production in the empire’s heartland. Second, the empire had access to, and then control over natural resources: namely, the gold mines of Bambuk and Bure, alongside Saharan salt production. It was the regulation of trade, however, that produced the greatest wealth for political leaders. The three empires were located at the intersection of ancient trans- Saharan trade routes. For centuries, camel caravans carried salt, copper, dried fruit, clothing and manufactured goods from the north, returning with kola nuts, hides, leather goods, ivory, gold and slaves from the south. These trading links served all the coastal and savannah communities of west Africa, stretched the length of the Sahel, extended across the Sahara to the Mediterranean and Europe, and even linked to the Silk Road as far as China. Given that Ghana, Mali and Songhai controlled the key crossroad cities at this network’s southern end (most notably Timbuktu and Gao), the imperial authorities benefitted from taxing and regulating this international trade, generating immense wealth.

  Map 2.4 Mali

  Adapted from © d-maps.com

  A measure of this prosperity can be gauged by the fact that when King Mansa Musa of Mali undertook the pilgrimage of haj in 1324, his entourage comprised hundreds, if not thousands, of followers. These pilgrims distributed so much gold on their travels that they saturated the market for this commodity across north Africa and Arabia. Contemporary accounts record that this metal’s price became devalued in Cairo for more than a decade as a consequence of Musa’s visit.13

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