Larabanga

Larabanga's history is bound up with the spread of Islam across the West African savanna. Muslim traders and scholars moved south along the routes that carried kola and salt between the Niger and the forest, and villages of Muslim clerics grew along them, keeping prayer, learning and Arabic writing far from the great cities. The village's mosque belongs to that tradition of mud-built Sudano-Sahelian architecture, and local tradition dates its founding to 1421 and attributes it to a trader who is said to have been told in a dream to build it where he had slept.

The village lies in the country of Gonja, the state founded by Mande horsemen in the seventeenth century, and Larabanga's people are counted among the Muslim families attached to the Gonja chiefs, serving as imams and scholars. The village is small and has never been a market town; its importance was religious and its position on the road.

Mole changed its modern fortunes. The reserve to the west, declared in the 1950s and made a national park in 1971, turned the road past Larabanga into a tourist route, and the village became the place where visitors stop on the way to the elephants. The mosque has been repaired and replastered repeatedly over its life, as mud buildings must be, and restoration work has been supported by the World Monuments Fund, which lists it among the world's most endangered sites. Damongo, a short way east, became the capital of the new Savannah Region when it was created in 2019.

The village is Muslim and its year follows the Islamic calendar: the two Eids, Damba, which marks the Prophet's birth and is celebrated across the north with drumming and gatherings at the chief's house, and the fasting month, when the rhythm of the day changes entirely. The mosque is used for the five daily prayers and for Friday, and the imam's family has long-standing standing in the village. An old Quran is kept as a treasured possession, which local tradition holds was granted to an imam of the mosque in answer to his prayers.

Gonja, Dagbani and Hausa, the market language of the north, are all heard in the village, and English is used with visitors. Chieftaincy runs in the Gonja manner, with chiefs enskinned rather than enstooled, and the village chief and the imam between them handle most matters.

Custom shapes how the village is seen. The Mystic Stone is a site of local devotion, credited with healing powers, and its story — of a rock that would not be shifted when the road was built — is told to every visitor. Because the village receives a steady stream of travellers heading for Mole, guiding, hosting and craft selling have become part of its economy. Hospitality is warm and greetings are long.

Larabanga is a small place, its compounds of earth walls and metal or thatched roofs gathered tightly around the mosque. Farming fills most of the year: yam, maize, millet, sorghum, groundnuts and beans on land around the village, with goats, sheep and guinea fowl kept at the compounds. Women gather shea nuts in the bush and boil and pound them into shea butter, a major source of cash in the savanna, and collect firewood and water.

Work follows the heat. People are in the fields at first light, back in the shade of the compounds through the middle of the day, and out again in the late afternoon; the evening belongs to sitting outside, talking and prayer. Children walk to the village school, and further schooling means Damongo or Tamale.

The road brings the other half of the economy. Guides, guesthouse keepers, drivers and traders sell to the traffic bound for Mole, and dry-season visitor numbers make a real difference to household income. The village's standing concerns are ordinary northern ones: water supply, the timing of the rains, the price of food and fertiliser, the state of the road, and the young people who leave for work in Kumasi and Accra. Crop damage by elephants and other wildlife from the park is a recurring problem for farmers near its edge.

Village food here is the food of the savanna, and it is plain and filling. The staple is tuo zaafi, a stiff porridge of maize or millet flour, dipped into ayoyo soup made from jute leaves, or into okra or groundnut soup, seasoned with dawadawa, the pungent fermented locust bean that gives northern cooking its depth. Meat is occasional rather than daily: guinea fowl, goat or dried fish.

Breakfast is koko, a spiced millet porridge, taken with koose, fried bean fritters, or with bread from the roadside. Rice with a tomato and groundnut stew, beans with fried plantain or gari, and roasted maize, yam or groundnuts are the everyday alternatives, and tubaani, steamed cakes of bean flour eaten with oil and pepper, appears at stalls. Shea butter from the village's own trees is used for frying.

Drink is water, sold in sachets along the road, and sweet tea; hibiscus sobolo and soft drinks come in with the traffic. Pito, the millet beer of the north, is brewed and drunk widely in the region, but Larabanga is a devout Muslim village and alcohol is not part of life here. Visitors heading to the park usually buy food and water in Damongo or Tamale, since the village shops carry little.