Living not too far from the Dagbamba people are the Konkomba, Bimoba and Basari.   They live in small villages and settlements mainly to the east of the Dagbomba peoples and close to the banks of the Oti River.   In the past the Dagbamba were their overlords, having subdued them in war and as a consequence driven them further eastward of Yendi which may have once been a Konkomba or Komba locality.   Lacking centralized organization and native rulers capable of mobilizing the people, the Konkomba could not withstand the more powerful and better organized Dagomba and were compelled to relocate further east to make way for their powerful neighbours.

 

Today Konkomba have their own paramountcies, but in the past they did not and could not have formed a common front or constituted themselves into centralized political units.   The Konkomba settlement was an autonomous unit in which a semblance of authority was vested in the elders of the lineage whose members were first to settle in the area.   The earthpriest or ritual authorities were usually from a different lineage and this allowed for the different segments of the local community to have a role in settlement affairs.   Though the lineage elders and earthpriests controlled ritual sanctions they were not rulers and did not command the obedience of the people.   In reality each corporate family maintained its political identity and autonomy and its members were expected to act together to support one another in intra-community disputes.   The membership of a settlement did not always remain the same as it was and still is normal for Konkomba to migrate in search of better farm lands when the old farms began to show signs of infertility.    Konkomba practice shifting cultivation.   They cultivate tuber crops, especially yam as a cash crop.   The naming of the Accra yam market as ‘Konkomba Market’ testifies to their role in the production of the crop.

 

Saboba and Sabzugu are the principal towns of the Konkomba.   They have had sizable communities in Togo as well.   However, as migrant farmers Konkomba have tended to migrate further south in search of fertile lands for yam cultivation.   The result is that today colonies of Konkomba can be found stretching from north of Saboba right into the Nkwatia District of the Volta Region as well as in the Brong Ahafo Region.   As strangers on other people’s lands they have had to pay rent for the land and this includes tribute and an acknowledgement of the authority of the peoples in whose territory they find themselves.   This is true for their relations with the Nanumba and the Gonja and it has led to clashes with local authorities and their communities in areas where the Konkomba resisted the demands of the local land owners for tribute.

 

The Bimobaland is found to the north of the Konkomba in parts of the Gambaga and the Bawku Districts.   Their main town and seat of their paramountcy is Bunkpurugu, which is now itself a District administrative capital.   Like their neighbours, the Konkomba, they have communities in Togo too.   And like the latter they too are patrilineal; patriliny as a descent principle governs Bimoba succession and inheritance.   Traditionally bridewealth was not emphasized in the contraction of marriage.   Wife-takers however worked on the farms of the wife-givers.   Child betrothal marriages and sister exchanges were common in the past and are still practiced by people, though such marriages are being resisted by young women especially.

 

Bimoba are farmers and their main staples are grain crops and legumes.   Farms may surround the compound.   They keep livestock as well.

 

The Basari constitute a smaller group living in Ghana and Togo. Their home settlements are close to the Konkomba stretching east of Zabzugu to the Togo border.   They have migrant communities around Bimbilla further south.   They too are farmers like their neighbours, the other speakers of Grumah languages.

 

Within the Upper west Region, the newest of the Regions of Ghana (it was carved out of the erstwhile upper Region in the 1980s), there are several related languages or dialects that are spoken to the west of the Sisala speaking areas.   These go by the terms Dagaari, Dagara, Wali Biriforli etc.   The Dagaari language is one of those officially sponsored languages. 

 

Culturally the communities that lie to the west of the Sisala are broadly homogeneous.   This is not to deny the existence of local variations within such an extensive area.   The Dagaba are found mainly, but not exclusively, in the Upper West Region of Ghana, in a number of small scale autonomous chiefdoms.   Some of them can also be found in Burkina Faso (where the term Dagara seems to be current) and in northeastern Cote D’Ivoire (Birfo and Lobi).   The Dagaba have been described as ‘a host of related villages, lineages, and clans which do not think of think of themselves as a “tribe” or call themselves by one name, such as Dagaaba’ (Barker 1986:71). This may be true more in the past than today.   Now in Accra and other big towns can found various associations that bring elite Dagaba people in Ghana together.

 

Traditionally and to a large extent today, Dagaba are farmers who cultivate grains (maize, millet, sorghum and legumes) and depend on cereals as staples, they also rear livestock and grow yams where the soil and the climate conditions permit this.   Both sexes have complementary roles on the farm, but as men migrate further south the bulk of the farm work falls to the women.   The quest for fertile land, which is not in adequate supply in the drier parts, and paid employment takes many of the illiterate male youth to other parts of Ghana, particularly to the less populated south of the Upper West, the Brong Ahafo and parts of southern Ghana.   Migration may be seasonal, in which case men leave their wives at home but it can be more or less permanent or long term for some.

 

In some respects their traditional kinship organization is not uniform.   In some communities patrilineal norms are salient while in others patrilineal and matrilineal modes co-exist in constituting corporate kin-groups such that a dual lineal scheme can be said to inform the transmission of property and wealth.

 

Resources may be classified into ‘movable’ and ‘immovable’ and transmitted matrilineally and patrilineally respectively.   Women inherit female property from female kin and men from their male kin.   The ideology for communities has been that certain property may be inherited from parents, paternal uncles and siblings while for certain others devolution is from maternal uncles and full siblings.

 

The ancestral religious beliefs that have centred on the ancestors and powerful local gods have been mediated by Christianity due to the mass conversion of Dagabas in the 1930s.

 

Their musical traditions assign a role to the xylophone in the ensemble.

 

The Wala who center on the commercial town of Wa and its immediate environs are main Moslems while the majority of Dagaba, the main ethnic group in the area, either espouse Catholicism or abide by the traditional religious practices that centre around the cult of the ancestors and the minor deities.   Some Dagaba communities, particularly those around the Jirapa, Lawra and Nandom areas are predominantly Catholic.   The mass conversion of Dagaba to Catholicism in the 1930s proceed along side their espousal of formal education in the area.   Consequently, today, the Dagaba boast of many highly educated people and professionals.   The religious differences are very significant in the determination of ethnic differences between Dagaba or Dagara and Wala.

 

Chieftaincies have been institutionalized in some of the communities of the Upper West long before the colonization of the area.   The paramountcy of Wa can boast of a succession of chiefs going far back in time and certainly predating the colonization of the area. For certain other areas, the institution of chieftaincy is of very fairly recent origin and the first chiefs may not date back much further than the time of Samori and the Zamberma slave raids.   British colonization of the area came in the immediate aftermath of these events.   Prior to the introduction of chieftaincies the institution of earthpriestships existed in the area.   Earthpriests still exist and collaborate with lineage and clan elders and the chiefs in the administration of the local communities.

 

The Dagaba people are predominantly farmers.   They grow sorghum and millet, groundnuts and other subsistence crops.   Yams are cultivated where the soils support this.   Due to the impoverishment of the land, some Dagaba youths have since the early decades of the colonial era migrated seasonally to the southern parts of the Upper West and Southern Ghana to undertake agriculture.   In addition to agriculture migrants take up other employment.   Dagaba from the drier Northern areas still migrate to other parts of the country to farm.   They can be found in southern parts of the Upper West and sparsely populated parts of the Lower Black Volta and Brong Ahafo.