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536 MOLE-DAGBANE-SPEAKING PEOPLES
Article
Kuder, Edward M. "The Moras of the Philippines." Far Eastern Quarterly 4:2 (1945):
119-126.
Lanfranco Blanchetti Revelli
MOLE-DAGBANE-SPEAKING PEOPLES The many societies of the Mole-
Dagbane-speaking peoples of northern Ghana and the adjacent parts of neighboring
countries are built upon a common linguistic and historical base. Numbering
approximately 7.7 million people, the societies range from small isolates
of a couple of thousand to the 5 million Mossi, most of whom live in Upper
Volta. Most of the other 30 or so societies number in the tens of thousands, the
largest being the Grusi (473,000) and Dogamba (350,000), population estimates
being based on inaccurate census figures of 1960 and 1967. Muslims account
for no more than 35 percent of the entire Mole-Dagbane-speaking peoples, with
the largest concentration among the Mossi (see Mossi).
The Mole-Dagbane-speaking peoples are not so much "Muslim" as they are
"influenced by Muslims." They affect the economy and society of the entire
region without being politically or numerically dominant. Indeed, so ethnically
pluralist is the region that the leading historian of Islam in the region has distinguished
the "dispersion of Muslims" from "the spread of Islam."
Mole-Dagbane is a linguistic term for a group of related languages. Alternate
terms for the language family are Voltaic and Gur; Mole-Dagbane is sometimes
applied to a subgrouping of the Gur family. Mole-Dagbane languages are found
in the basin drained by the middle and upper parts of the Volta River, which
rises in three branches in Upper Volta and crosses Ghana to the sea. The headwaters
of the river are in Mossi country. It is the so-called Middle Volta Basin
that is home to the Mole-Dagbane peoples. A few outlying groups include the
Dogon, famous for their art, in the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, northwest
of the Mossi, who forced them there. Others are the Bassari, Batonun and related
peoples who live east of the Volta Basin in northern Togo Benin and Nigeria.
In structure, Mole-Dagbane societies range from "acephalous" groups with
no greater authority than the patriarch of an extended family to a string of
genealogically related kingdoms, each with complicated internal organizations.
Kingdoms include a variety of ethnic groups, not all of them Mole-Dagbanespeaking,
the result being a lack of any fixed individual identity. A given ethnic
group may occur in more than one kingdom, or both in and out of such organized
states. A particular clan may spread lineal kinship connections across several
ethnic groups. However, in contemporary southern Ghanian usage, the term
"Northerner" is virtually synonymous with Mole-Dagbane.
The Volta Basin location is important to the Mole-Dagbane peoples, both in
terms of their general history and specifically with respect to Islam. Since ancient
times long-distance trade routes have crisscrossed the West African savanna,
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