Gan (ethnicity)

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The Gan are an ethnic group that mainly lives in the southwest of the African Republic of Burkina Faso .

geography

The Gan live in the province of Poni in the southwest of Burkina Faso in an area drained by several tributaries of the Dgporo , which rises in the highest elevations to 449 meters above sea level. The Dgporo is a tributary of the Poni river, which gives the province its name, and which in turn flows into the Black Volta , the border river to Ghana . The predominant form of vegetation in the land of the Gan is savannah, in which the approximately 6000 Gan live in small, widely scattered settlements from the cultivation of yam , millet and wheat.

history

The tradition of the kings of the Gan in their capital Opiré west of Gaoua reports that the Gan immigrated from the area in the former Gold Coast (today: Republic of Ghana ) to the northwest via today's Côte d'Ivoire into their current settlement area. There they settled in Kĩngé and expanded their settlement area under the direction of their kings. Opiré has been the seat of kings since the late 16th century. The kingdom became wealthy through gold panning and trading. Since 2003, the Gan has been ruled by the 29th king, Toukpã Batou, a considerably reduced empire, which was not completely subdued by the colonial power France until the First World War .

language

The language of the Gan was classified by Gebriel Massey in 1975 as belonging to the Gur language and then belongs to the core group Central Gur and there again to the subgroup South.

World Heritage

Since 2009 the remains of the ruins of Loropéni are the only place in Burkina Faso to be declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO . It is a walled area protected by around 100 buildings. Based on C14 dating, the beginning of the settlement of the square is estimated to be around the year 1100 AD. Loropéni is a little more than eight kilometers southeast of Opiré on the road to Gaoua.

According to archaeologists, these and similar defenses, called by the Gan Karāga , served to defend the important trade connection from the gold-rich kingdom of Mali to the Atlantic coast and the slave trade necessary for the procurement of workers for gold mining. The Gan traditions explain that the fortress structures already existed when they arrived in today's settlement area and that they were abandoned in the 19th century at the latest.

literature

  • Gabriel Mannessy: Les langues Oti-Volta. SELAF, Paris 1975.
  • Daniela Bagnolo: The Gan of Burkina Faso. Reconstruction of the History and Symbolics of a Little-Known Kingdom. Fondation Culturelle Musée Barbier-Mueller, Geneva 2010, ISBN 978-2-88104-045-0 .

See also