Tamale

Tamale grew where several Dagomba farming villages met on open savanna, in the kingdom of Dagbon, whose rulers, the Ya-Na, have long held their seat at Yendi to the east. The place had no great trading past of its own: the famous markets of the north were at Salaga, on the kola route, and the seats of power were the chiefs' towns. What made Tamale was colonial administration. After Britain declared the Northern Territories a protectorate in 1901, the British established their administrative headquarters here in 1907, once German officials had taken Yendi, on a site central, flat and well-watered enough to build on.

Administration brought roads, a garrison, schools and a hospital, and the town drew people from across the north. Colonial investment in the region as a whole was slight — the Northern Territories were treated mainly as a labour reserve for the mines and cocoa farms of the south — so Tamale's growth was also a concentration of the little that existed. Its plan still shows the colonial layout, with a central grid of offices and markets and the old aerodrome on the edge.

Tamale became the capital of the Northern Region in 1960 and the hub of every northern route. Universities, hospitals, aid agencies and government departments followed, and the population multiplied several times over in a few decades. When the old Northern Region was divided in 2019 to create the Savannah and North East regions, Tamale remained the capital of what was left and the unquestioned capital of the north as a whole.

This is the centre of Dagbon, and Dagbani is the language of the streets. Dagomba society is organised around chieftaincy: chiefs are enskinned, seated on animal skins rather than stools, and the hierarchy runs from village chiefs up to the Ya-Na at Yendi. Drummers, the lunsi, are a hereditary class who keep the genealogies of the royal houses and recite them at ceremonies, and praise singing and the talking drum are still central to public occasions.

Islam is the majority faith and gives the city its calendar. Damba, marking the Prophet's birth, brings chiefs out in smocks under umbrellas with horses and drumming; Bugum, the fire festival, fills the night with torch processions; and the two Eids empty the streets for prayer and fill them again afterwards. Christian churches and traditional practice exist alongside, and communities from the Upper regions, Gonja and the south add other languages.

The smock — batakari or fugu, hand-woven in narrow strips and sewn into a wide tunic — is the north's signature garment and a Tamale speciality, worn with a distinctive hat at festivals. Weavers, leatherworkers and shea-butter processors work in the city and its villages. Football is followed closely, and bicycles and motorbikes are so much part of daily life that the city is known across Ghana for them.

The 2021 census counted 374,744 people in Tamale, which makes it Ghana's third largest city and much the largest in the north. It is young, fast-growing and low-rise, spreading outwards in compounds and concrete houses as farmland on the edges is turned into plots. Most households combine several kinds of work: trading, transport, a salaried job, and farming on land outside the city.

The economy rests on trade, government, education and services rather than industry. The market moves grain, yams, livestock and shea; aid organisations and NGOs have a heavy presence in the north and employ many people in the city; universities, colleges and the teaching hospital anchor a professional class, and craft work in smocks, leather and baskets sells to traders from the south.

Life follows the heat and the calendar. Markets and building sites are busiest in the early morning, afternoons are slow and shaded, and the streets refill in the cool of the evening around grills and pito bars. Water supply, electricity, the price of fertiliser and the timing of the rains are the standing concerns, along with the gap in wealth and services between the north and the south, and the migration of young people to Kumasi and Accra for work.

Tamale eats the food of the savanna. The staple is tuo zaafi, known everywhere as TZ, a stiff porridge of maize or millet flour, served with ayoyo, the slippery soup of jute leaves, or with okra or groundnut soup, and usually with guinea fowl or beef. Dawadawa, fermented locust beans pressed into dark balls, gives northern soups their pungent depth, and shea butter, produced by women's groups across the region, is used in cooking as well as on the skin.

Breakfast is koko, a spiced millet porridge, with koose, fried bean fritters, sold at the roadside from before dawn. Tubaani, steamed bean-flour cakes eaten with oil and pepper, and wasawasa, a dish of steamed yam-peel flour, are local specialities found much more easily here than in the south. Guinea fowl is the celebratory meat, grilled whole or in stew, and khebab skewers of beef and offal, dusted with ground groundnut and pepper, grill along the roads after dark. Waakye and jollof rice have come north and are everywhere at midday.

Pito, the lightly fermented millet or sorghum beer brewed in households and sold in calabashes, is the region's drink, though in a mainly Muslim city many people take sobolo, the chilled hibiscus drink, or milk drinks and sweet tea instead.