Wa

Wa grew up as the capital of the Wala state, a Muslim polity of the far north-west whose ruler carries the title Wa Naa. Its ruling houses trace descent from Mande and Dagomba incomers who settled among the Dagaaba and Sisaala farmers of the area from about the seventeenth century, while Muslim traders and scholars arrived along the routes that carried kola, salt and cloth between the forest and the Niger bend. The town was never large, but it was a court, a market and a centre of Quranic learning, and its palace was built of mud and timber in the Sudano-Sahelian manner.

The late nineteenth century was violent. The wars of Samori Toure and his lieutenants reached the north-west in the 1890s, and a British force was routed at Wa in 1897, before British and French officers divided the region between their spheres. Wa fell inside the Northern Territories protectorate declared by Britain in 1901, which was governed cheaply and used as a source of migrant labour for the mines and cocoa farms of the south.

After independence the town's fortunes turned on administration. It lay in the Upper Region formed in 1960 and became, when that was divided in 1983, the capital of the new Upper West Region, which brought ministries, a hospital and schools. A campus of the University for Development Studies arrived in the 1990s and became a university in its own right, made autonomous in 2019 and opened in 2020, and the town has grown outwards along its main roads since. The palace remains the centre of Wala ceremonial life.

Wa is the Wala town, and Waali, a Mabia language close to Dagaare and Dagbani, is heard in the market alongside Dagaare from the surrounding countryside, Sisaali from the east and Hausa from the traders. Islam has been established here for centuries and shapes the calendar: Friday prayers empty the offices, Ramadan reorders the day, and the two Eids and Damba bring the chiefs, drummers and praise singers to the palace, where the Wa Naa sits in state and the town turns out to greet him. Christian churches and traditional shrines belong to the same landscape, particularly among families with roots in the Dagaaba villages.

Chiefs here are enskinned rather than enstooled, seated on animal skins, and the Wala state has its own hierarchy of divisional chiefs, elders and Muslim officeholders whose roles in festivals are fixed by custom. Respect is shown by greeting first and at length, using the right hand, and lowering the head or removing a hat before a chief.

The smock — batakari or fugu — is everyday wear as well as ceremonial dress, woven in narrow strips and sewn into a wide tunic, and is worn with a woven cap. Xylophone music of the Dagaaba, drumming, and funeral dances that can last for days are the region's best-known performing traditions, and funerals remain the largest social gatherings of all, drawing relatives home from Kumasi and Accra.

About 200,000 people lived in Wa at the 2021 census, making it a city by Ghanaian standards and the largest place for a long way in any direction. Its economy is built on being a capital: the regional administration, the hospital, banks, schools and the university employ many, and everyone else trades, farms or rides. Maize, millet, sorghum, yams and groundnuts come in from the villages, cattle and guinea fowl are kept, and women gather and process shea nuts into butter, much of it bought by exporters for cosmetics.

The centre is dense, with compound houses, shops and workshops packed around the palace, the mosque and the market; the newer quarters spread along the roads towards Bamahu, Kpaguri and Charia in a thinner grid of concrete blocks and building plots. Motorbikes are the characteristic sound and sight of the town, and the yellow shared taxis fill the main streets.

Days start early and finish early. Farming, trading and offices are all morning work, the afternoon belongs to shade, and the evening to the grills, the drinking spots and the mosque. Water supply, electricity cuts, the timing of the rains and the pull of migration to the south are the running concerns, and illegal small-scale gold mining has spread in parts of the Upper West.

The staple is tuo zaafi, universally called TZ: a stiff porridge of maize or millet flour, dipped by hand into ayoyo soup made from jute leaves, or into okra or groundnut soup, and eaten with guinea fowl, beef or dried fish. Dawadawa, fermented locust beans, gives the soups their deep, pungent base, and shea butter is used as cooking fat as well as on the skin.

Breakfast is koko, a spiced millet porridge, taken with koose, fried bean fritters, or with a slab of bread from a clay oven. Later in the day the chop bars serve waakye — rice and beans with stew, gari and egg — jollof, plain rice with groundnut soup, and fried yam. Tubaani, steamed bean-flour cakes eaten with oil and pepper, and wasawasa, made from yam-peel flour, are northern specialities sold from bowls at the roadside. Guinea fowl is the celebration meat, grilled whole or stewed, and khebab skewers of beef and offal appear as the sun goes down.

Pito, a lightly fermented beer of millet or sorghum brewed in households, is the regional drink, sold from big pots and drunk from calabashes at the pito bars, though in a Muslim town many people do not drink it. Sobolo, the hibiscus infusion, sachet water, and strong sweet tea with condensed milk from the roadside kiosks round out the day.