Bolgatanga

The area around Bolgatanga has been farmed and settled for a very long time, in the dense scatter of compounds that still characterises the Upper East. This was not a land of large kingdoms: the Frafra and their neighbours lived in communities organised around lineages, earth priests who held ritual authority over land, and local chiefs, and the fortified hill settlements at Tengzug in the Tongo Hills were places of refuge and of shrines whose reputation reached far beyond the district.

Colonial rule arrived late and lightly. Britain took the Northern Territories as a protectorate in 1901, and Bolgatanga grew as an administrative post and market on the road north to the French territory that became Burkina Faso. The colonial administration invested little here and treated the north as a labour reserve, recruiting men for mines and cocoa farms in the south — a pattern of migration that continues in altered form today. Catholic missions, notably at Navrongo, brought the first schools to the district.

After independence the town's weight grew with administration. The Upper Region was separated from the Northern Region in 1960, and when it was divided in 1983 Bolgatanga became the capital of the new Upper East Region. Government offices, a regional hospital and colleges followed. In the same decades the basket weaving of the surrounding villages turned from household craft into an export trade, and Bolga baskets became the town's name abroad.

The Frafra — a name covering the Gurune-speaking communities of the district — give the town its character, alongside Kusasi, Nabdam, Tallensi, Builsa and Kasena neighbours, each with their own language. Authority is shared between chiefs, who are enskinned in the northern manner, and the tendana or earth priest, who speaks for the land and its shrines; disputes over land and custom often involve both. The Tengzug shrines in the Tongo Hills draw visitors and pilgrims from across Ghana and beyond.

Craft is the region's best-known cultural export. Baskets are woven from tough savanna grass, dyed in strong colours and plaited into round bowls and shopping baskets, largely by women in the villages around the town; leatherworkers make bags, sandals and hats, and weavers produce the striped smock, the batakari or fugu, that northern men wear at ceremonies. At Sirigu, women paint the walls of their compounds with black, white and ochre patterns, and have organised to keep the practice alive and sell the pottery that goes with it.

Music runs to the two-string gonje fiddle, drums and the flutes played at funerals, and Frafra funeral celebrations, often held long after a death, are loud, crowded and central to social life. Christianity is strong, particularly Catholicism from the Navrongo missions, with a Muslim minority in the zongo and traditional practice woven through both.

About 142,000 people lived in Bolgatanga at the 2021 census, which makes it a medium-sized town that serves a much larger rural population. Government offices, the regional hospital, schools and colleges provide the salaried jobs; everyone else trades, farms, drives, weaves or runs a workshop. Money from relatives working in the south and abroad is an important part of many household budgets.

The countryside around is densely settled and heavily farmed: millet, sorghum, maize, rice, groundnuts and beans on small plots, with dry-season gardening of tomatoes and onions near dams, and livestock kept at every compound. Land is short and soils are tired, and the rains are the year's great uncertainty. Basket weaving fills the dry months and brings cash into the villages, sold through the town's market to buyers from Accra and overseas.

Days start early and slow to a halt in the afternoon heat, picking up again towards evening around the grills and pito yards. The standing concerns are water, the cost of fertiliser, the price buyers pay for baskets, and the poverty gap between the Upper East and southern Ghana. The chieftaincy conflict around Bawku, to the east, and its curfews affect trade and travel across the region, and small-scale illegal gold mining has spread in parts of the Upper East.

The everyday meal is tuo zaafi — TZ — the stiff maize or millet porridge of the savanna, dipped into ayoyo soup made from jute leaves, or into okra, bito or groundnut soup. Dawadawa, fermented locust beans, is the region's defining seasoning, pungent and dark, and shea butter, processed by women from nuts gathered in the bush, is the cooking fat as well as a cosmetic. Guinea fowl is the meat of choice for a celebration, grilled or stewed, and beef, goat and dried fish fill in the rest.

Mornings begin with koko, spiced millet porridge, eaten with koose, fried bean fritters, or with bread. Rice and beans, waakye, tubaani, the steamed bean-flour cake eaten with oil and pepper, and roasted or boiled yam are the other staples, and khebab skewers dusted with ground groundnut and pepper grill at the roadside in the evening. Millet and sorghum are ground at small mills in every neighbourhood.

Pito, the lightly fermented millet beer, is central here in a way it is not further south: brewed by women in household breweries and drunk warm from calabashes in yards that serve as meeting places. Sweet tea, sobolo made from hibiscus, and sachet water are the everyday alternatives.