The Mossi Kingdoms

The Mossi Kingdoms. The Mossi kingdoms (c. 1400-1896) were a group of related states in the bend of the Niger River, in what is now Burkina Faso, which for five centuries formed one of the most durable political systems of West Africa. Mossi tradition traces the kingdoms to a princess named Yennenga, daughter of a Dagomba king, whose son Ouedraogo became the ancestor of the Mossi rulers. From the fifteenth century, Mossi horsemen expanded over the Volta basin and founded a family of kingdoms, of which Ouagadougou, ruled by the Moro Naba, became the greatest.

The Mossi state combined cavalry power with a remarkable social order. The Moro Naba and the kings of the lesser Mossi states, such as Yatenga, ruled through courts of titled officials, many of them drawn from the families of conquered peoples, while the original inhabitants kept authority over the earth as masters of the land. Mossi armies, famous for their mounted warriors, raided deep toward the Niger, clashing with the Songhai Empire and the Mali successor states, though they never built a large centralized empire of their own.

The kingdoms long resisted both Islam and empire. Muslim merchants and clerics lived at the courts, but the Mossi kings generally kept their traditional religion, and Islam made only slow headway among the Mossi compared with their neighbors. When the great jihads of the nineteenth century swept across the Western Sudan, the Mossi states held their ground. Their independence finally ended with European conquest: French forces took Ouagadougou in 1896 and absorbed the kingdoms into what became the colony of Upper Volta.

The Mossi legacy is still visible today. The Moro Naba of Ouagadougou remains an honored traditional ruler, and the Mossi language, Moore, is spoken by millions, making the Mossi the largest ethnic group in Burkina Faso. Historians value the Mossi kingdoms as a rare case of states that maintained their institutions, territory, and independence against empires, jihads, and slave raiders for nearly half a millennium.

To read more about this topic:

Wikipedia: Mossi Kingdoms Encyclopaedia Universalis: Royaume de Ouagadougou BlackPast: Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso Every Culture: Mossi Sociopolitical Organization