Salaga

Salaga was a great market town of Gonja, where traders from the forest country met merchants from the northern savanna. Gonja, Hausa, Wangara, Dagomba and other communities gathered there, giving it a varied population and a reputation that earned it the name “Timbuktu of the south.” Kola from the south traveled through the market toward Hausaland, alongside cloth, animals and other goods.

Salaga succeeded the older Gonja market of Kafaba after the seventeenth century and became especially important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wars with Kong helped turn Asante trade toward the route through Salaga. Its market also dealt in enslaved people, some of whom were carried south to the Atlantic coast. The traffic brought wealth to traders and rulers while exposing captives to separation, forced journeys and sale far from home.