Trans-Saharan Trade Routes Through Northern Ghana

In the dry season of 1876, the French explorer Louis-Gustave Binger arrived at the gates of Salaga, a town in the East Gonja District of what is now Ghana's Savannah Region, and recorded his astonishment. Before him spread a market so vast, so cosmopolitan, and so commercially sophisticated that he compared it to the legendary Timbuktu itself. Hausa traders from Kano and Katsina haggled with Asante merchants over baskets of kola nuts. Wangara scholars from the Niger Bend traded manuscripts and amulets alongside bolts of North African cloth. Dagomba horsemen led caravans of cattle and groundnuts from Yendi. And everywhere, the currency of the savannah changed hands: cowrie shells, gold dust, blocks of Saharan salt cut from the mines of Taghaza and Taoudenni. Salaga, known to traders across West Africa as "the Timbuktu of the South," was the living proof that for centuries before European ships touched the Gold Coast, northern Ghana had been woven into a vast commercial network stretching across the Sahara to the Mediterranean and beyond.

The trans-Saharan trade routes that passed through northern Ghana were not a single road but a web of interconnected paths, developed over more than a millennium. The oldest routes connected the goldfields of the Akan forest, in what is now southern Ghana, to the great entrepôts of the western Sudan: Djenné, Timbuktu, and Gao on the Niger River. From there, goods crossed the Sahara to North African ports like Sijilmasa in Morocco, Ghadames in Libya, and the cities of Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia). The journey from the forest edge to the Mediterranean could take six months or more, passing through multiple ecological zones: dense tropical forest, the transitional Guinea savannah, the dry Sudan savannah, the semi-arid Sahel, and finally the vast emptiness of the Sahara itself.

Gold was the commodity that first drew the trans-Saharan trade through the territories of modern Ghana. The Akan goldfields, particularly those around Bono-Manso (near present-day Techiman in the Bono Region), were among the richest in West Africa. Arab geographers knew of this gold by the 8th century: the great polymath al-Fazari, writing around 773 CE, referred to "Ghana" as "the land of gold," though he was describing the Ghana Empire far to the northwest, which controlled the northern terminus of the gold trade. By the 11th century, the geographer al-Bakri recorded that the ruler of Ghana taxed every donkey-load of gold entering or leaving his domain, a system that generated enormous revenue and financed a court of legendary splendour.