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540 MOLE-DAGBANE-SPEAKING PEOPLES
Sisala, lumped with their neighbors, the Dagari (201,680), the Talensi (138,370)
and the Kusai (121,610), in the northeast corner of Ghana. There were 110,150
Konkomba and 37,550 Lobi in Ghana, with large populations of the former in
Togo and the latter in Upper Volta and Ivory Coast.
In 1960 what had been ruled by the British from the turn of the century to
1957 as the "Northern Territories" comprised the Upper and Northern Regions.
The former included most of the stateless peoples, the latter the state of Mamprusi,
Dagomba and Gonja. The 1960 Upper Region population was 862,000
and the Northern Region was 427,000, for a combined total of 1,289,000 out
of a national population of 6,727,000. Of those 1,289,000 Northerners, some
186,000 (14.4 percent) were Muslims, not all of whom were Mole-Dagbane
people.
Post-1960 ethnic and religious figures are not available, save for a 1967
estimate of 267,907 in the six constituencies corresponding to the Dagomba
state. The 1970 census counted 727,618 in the Northern Region and 862,723 in
the Upper Region, for a total of 1,590,341.
The meaning of the 14 percent Muslim figures varies as regional data are
disaggregated. Muslims tend to concentrate in towns and cities. A study of the
Sisala, for example, found that of Sisala living in towns larger than 5,000
population, 49.4 percent were Muslims in 1960, as opposed to only 8.4 percent
for Sisala in rural locations. In this case, most of the town-dwelling Sisala were
migrants in southern Ghanian cities. These migrants, like others leaving the
savanna with its broadly similar cultures and religion based upon ancestral graves,
found that a universalist religion served them better in the culturally and ecologically
different southern Ghana. (Parallel shifts in proportions existed for the
far smaller Christian Sisala community.) Not all urban Sisala were considered
deeply or even permanently converted.
The Sisala figures, however, do indicate that when Mole-Dagbane peoples
participate in the Ghanian nation they are both likely to be considered Muslim
by southerners and to be in a situation where it would indeed be advantageous
to identify oneself as Muslim. The north of Ghana is far less developed than the
rest of the country and suffered further for having been in the political opposition
during the Nkrumah years.
A quirk of politics in 1979 gave the north its first substantial access to political
power. The circumstances of the return to civilian rule meant that the leader of
the People's National Party was ineligible to stand for the presidential election.
His replacement, Dr. Hilla Limann, a diplomat, won the election despite being
a virtual unknown within Ghana. He is a Sisala, from the border with Upper
Volta. When his government in its turn was overthrown by another military coup
d'etat in December 1981, a contributing factor, if not the major one, was southern
Ghanian opposition to a shift in regional importance. Significantly, that shift
was seen as benefitting a "Muslim" population. A commentator on the regional
split in the Limann regime noted that "by 1981 some people were grumbling
that 'each new appointment is Alhaji This or Issaka That.' " The historical