Mamprusi

The Mamprusi are a Gur-speaking people of the grasslands north of the White Volta, in northern Ghana and Togo, where they farm and raise livestock and speak Mampruli. Their kingdom of Mamprugu was founded around the 1200s when the warrior Naa Gbewaa, grandson of the legendary hunter Tohazie, settled at Pusiga and built a realm stretching into Togo and Burkina Faso.

The Mamprusi count themselves the eldest Mole-Dagbamba branch; their king, the Nayiri, held ritual seniority over related kingdoms and invested the Mogho Naaba of Ouagadougou, whose royal line descends from Gbewaa's daughter Yennenga. Dyula merchants brought Islam from the 1600s, and the Mamprusi gradually adopted it while keeping chiefly rituals and the ancestral tomb at Pusiga.