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MOLE-DAGBANE-SPEAKING PEOPLES 539
kings or chiefs and economic centers, "Dyula trading towns," of Muslims. The
underlying peasant society, based on kinship, was relatively unaffected by the
states and trade networks, which existed "above" them.
During the development of this regional system, the great Muslim reformer
Uthman don Fodio wrote off the Volta Basin states and peoples as "countries
where infidelity is overwhelming and Islam is rare." The fact that the societies
were not Muslim obscures the importance of Islam to them. Several writers note
the importance of charms containing Quranic writing, which were in demand in
the Akan forest states and the savanna cavalry-based ones. Indeed, an early
European observer of Asante noted that this trade was such that a Muslim could
be supported for a month by a piece of paper. The economic and spiritual power
of Islam caused Muslims to receive formal recognition and participation in official
pagan administrations. Imams became court functionaries by the early eighteenth
century. Their influence was out of proportion to the percentage of Muslim
citizens. Pagan fathers sent sons to Muslim schools for the advantages they
would gain, and entire pagan villages would sometimes invite a Muslim scholar
to found a school. In the northwest corner of the basin in the eighteenth century
the small state of Wa was founded upon a Dyula trading town.
The persistence of "stateless" Mole-Dagbane peoples alongside and between
organized states may be accounted for by two factors. One is that states taxed
trade, not farmers. Expanding boundaries to incorporate peasants did not necessarily
pay. Second, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, slaves
were important in the regional economy. Since a Muslim cannot be enslaved by
another Muslim, and since the trading aspects of the states were the most Islamized,
there was a positive benefit in having handy populations who were outside
the formal protections of the state.
Throughout African states, Islamized and not, there is a tendency towards
undefined boundaries that shade off into zones of weaker and weaker control.
This is the case of the Mole-Dagbane "stateless" peoples like the Talensi (Tale;
Fra-Fra), Sisala (Isala), Lobi, Lowiili, Birifor and Dagari (Dagabaa), who cannot
be understood as societies without taking into account their proximity to states.
One common "tribe" in the literature, the Grusi (in widely varying spellings),
are nothing more than the congeries of stateless peoples south of the Mossi and
north and east of the Mamprusi and Dagomba; the word is the Mossi collective
noun labelling all the assorted stateless peoples to their south. It is an identity
with meaning only to those who bestowed it on peoples whose societies sharply
contrasted to their own.
Complete population figures for the Mole-Dagbane peoples are lacking. Among
the stateless groups, in fact, merely defining ethnic identity, much less counting
members, is difficult and controversial. The 1960 Ghana census was the last one
to publish ethnic enumerations, and those for Mole-Dagbane people are often
"supertribalized" aggregations. In that census, there were 217,640 Dagomba,
186,970 of whom were living in their homeland. There were 58,710 Mamprusi,
46,500 of whom were in their territory. The stateless societies included 59,000