Bondoukou

Bondoukou grew out of the trade that linked the goldfields and kola forests of the Akan country to the markets of the Sahel. Juula merchants, Mande-speaking Muslims descended from Soninke Wangara traders, made the town their chief settlement after Begho, the older trading city just across what is now the Ghanaian border, was destroyed by Asante in the middle of the eighteenth century. They built quarters of mud houses, mosques and teaching households, and the town became known across the region for its scholars and its Koranic schools.

The land belonged to the Koulango, and the Abron, an Akan people who had moved north-west from the Asante country, established the kingdom of Gyaman over it, with Bondoukou as its principal town and market. The arrangement was a familiar West African one: an Akan ruling dynasty, a Koulango farming population and a Muslim merchant class that kept the trade and the learning, each with its own authority.

The kingdom was repeatedly drawn into wars with Asante, which destroyed its capital in 1740 and 1741, and at the end of the nineteenth century the region became a contested frontier between the French advancing from the west and the British in the Gold Coast. A French protectorate treaty was signed with the Abron king of Bondoukou in 1888, the town fell to the forces of Samory Touré in the years between 1895 and 1897, and the border drawn afterwards divided Gyaman between French and British territory, leaving the town a few kilometres inside Côte d'Ivoire. Bondoukou remained an administrative and market centre through the colonial period and after independence, and it is still the main town of the north-east.

Three traditions meet in Bondoukou and have done so for centuries. The Juula brought Islam, Arabic learning, long-distance trade and the Dioula language that is still the speech of the market. The Abron brought Akan kingship, with its stools and regalia, its matrilineal descent and its formal court language. The Koulango, the older population of the land, keep their own language, their farming ceremonies and their shrines.

Islam is the dominant religion and gives the town its shape: the call to prayer from dozens of small mosques, Friday gatherings, the fast of Ramadan and the sacrifice at Tabaski, when families slaughter sheep and visit through the day. Koranic schooling has long been a source of the town's reputation, and families of scholars are respected accordingly. Christian communities and traditional practice exist alongside, and in the villages masked dances and harvest rites continue.

The Ghanaian border is a cultural fact rather than a barrier. Families are divided by it, Akan kinship runs across it, traders cross daily, and Ghanaian music, football and goods are part of local life. Manners are formal and unhurried: greetings first, the right hand for giving and receiving, elders and imams addressed with care, and modest dress expected in the old quarters.

About 140,000 people live in Bondoukou by a 2021 estimate, which makes it a medium-sized town rather than a city, and it feels like one — low buildings, unpaved side streets and a rhythm set by the market and the mosques. Its population mixes Koulango, Abron and Juula families with Malinké, Senufo and Burkinabè settlers and a steady traffic of Ghanaian traders.

Farming and trade support almost everyone. Yams, cassava, maize and rice are grown around the town, cashew nuts have become a major cash crop across the north-east, and cocoa is farmed in the wetter country to the south. Cross-border commerce in kola, foodstuffs and manufactured goods is constant, and administration, schools and the hospital provide the salaried jobs.

Mornings are for the market and the fields, the early afternoon is quiet in the heat, and the evening brings the grills, tea stalls and conversation in front of the compounds. The issues people raise are familiar across the region: water and electricity supply, the state of the roads, work for young people, and the pull of Abidjan and of Ghana for those who leave.

The cooking here sits between the savanna and the forest. Yam is pounded into foutou, a smooth dough eaten by hand with sauce arachide thick with groundnut paste, sauce graine from boiled palm nuts, or a light aubergine and tomato sauce, while tô, the stiff maize or millet porridge of the north, is eaten with okra or leaf sauces seasoned with soumbala, the pungent fermented paste of néré seeds. Rice with a meat and tomato sauce is everywhere, and shea butter is used in cooking as well as on the skin.

Grilled meat is the evening food: brochettes of beef, and mutton cut small, cooked over charcoal and served with raw onion, chilli and spice, with whole sheep roasted for Tabaski. Attiéké, the fermented cassava couscous of the south, and alloco, plantain fried in palm oil, have become standard here too, usually with braised fish or chicken.

Kola nuts are more than a crop in Bondoukou: bitter and mildly stimulating, they are chewed, offered to guests and used in ceremonies, and they were the trade that built the town. Sweet mint tea is brewed slowly in the merchant quarters, and bissap from hibiscus flowers, gnamakoudji made from ginger, and dèguè of millet in curdled milk are the usual drinks and snacks, with mangoes and cashew fruit in season.