Begho

Begho, called Nsoko or Insoco in older sources, stood on the northern edge of the forest where it meets the savanna, in the Bono country just south of the later town of Hani. It was founded in the eleventh century on older Brong settlements, and by the fifteenth century it was a large trading town where Jula merchants of Soninke Wangara descent set up outlying quarters of their own. Gold from the Akan fields went north to Jenne and Timbuktu, and kola and enslaved people went with it. Begho was known for its brass and cloth.

Three roads ran south from Begho towards the coast: one through Dormaa and Ahafo to Twifo and Elmina, one through Wenchi, Adansi and Assin to the coast near Cape Coast, and a later one across the Afram plains to Accra. By the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries it was a busy town of many peoples with links to distant Islamic trade routes. Oral tradition says the Asante destroyed it in the middle of the eighteenth century and scattered its people, and Kong and Bondoukou trace their origins to refugees from Begho. A smaller town remained into the early nineteenth century.