Senufo

Senufo is the Atlantic-Congo branch of some fifteen closely related languages spread across northern Ivory Coast, southern Mali and south-western Burkina Faso, with the isolated Nafaanra tongue in Ghana.

The old town of Korhogo was already a Senufo centre in the thirteenth century, and from the fourteenth century Dyula merchants moving out of the Mali Empire founded trading towns such as Kong on Senufo land. The Senufo took shape as a distinct group in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in the north they formed the backbone of the Kénédougou Kingdom around Sikasso.

In 1710 the Dyula leader Seku Watara built the Kong Empire, a loose commercial state whose power ran along the trade routes as far as Sya, taken in 1737; Muslim traders settled in Senufo towns under its rule, though most Senufo kept their ancestral religion.