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Ghana-Net.com · Names Shaping Ghana · 1800s
The slave raider who emptied northern Ghana — ninety years after abolition
Born in what is now Niger. Came south as a mercenary. Built a state on the trade in human beings across what are now the Upper East, Upper West, Savannah and Northern Regions, and fed the market at Salaga. His raids ended in 1897 — not because anyone's conscience turned, but because a French officer and an army of his own former subjects beat him in the field. He is the most consequential man in northern Ghana's modern history, and he does not appear on a single tourist itinerary.
Not for entertainment, and not as a villain story. Babatu is here because you cannot understand three things about Ghana without him: why the north is the poorest part of the country, why the slave trade did not end when the textbooks say it ended, and why one festival in Sandema every December is a genuine celebration of survival.
His descendants live in northern Ghana today. Some of them have spoken publicly about guarding the family history in the interest of reconciliation rather than reviving old enmities, and that is the spirit this page is written in. The point is the system, not the bloodline.
Babatu was born at Indunga, in Zabarima — Zabrama, or Zarma — country, in what is now the Republic of Niger, around the middle of the nineteenth century. He came south into Grunshi country in the 1860s.
He was not the first. A small group of Zabarima horsemen had already settled among the Sisala, and they had arrived for a specific reason, which is the fact this page turns on.
The Zabarima did not arrive as foreign invaders out of nowhere. They came south as mercenary horsemen who had taken part in Dagomba slave-raiding expeditions. A Ghanaian state brought in professional cavalry to help with raiding it was already doing, and the cavalry stayed.
Slave raiding in northern Ghana did not begin with Babatu. Historians of the Bulsa date the raids on the Grunshi peoples back to 1732 — a century and a half before Babatu's name appears — carried out by their centralised southern neighbours, principally Dagomba. The Zabarima were hired into an existing industry. Under Babatu they took it over, industrialised it, and turned it into a state of their own.
Under Alfa Hano, and then Alfa Gazari, the Zabarima built control across the region partly by settlement, partly by hiring themselves into local disputes — and then by simply not leaving. Babatu succeeded Gazari around 1878, and the operation reached its height under him.
This is why there is no clean version. A raider from Niger, hired by a kingdom in what is now Ghana, to take people from other communities in what is now Ghana, to sell at a market in what is now Ghana, run by another Ghanaian kingdom, for onward sale to Europeans on the coast and to buyers across the Sahara. Every link in that chain is African except the last one, and the last one is the reason all the others paid.
His targets were the peoples grouped under the label Grunshi — a term used by outsiders that covered the Sisala, Builsa, Kasena, Nankani, Awuna, Dagarti and other communities living in the belt between the larger states of Mossi, Mamprusi, Dagomba, Gonja and Wa.
There is a pattern there and it is the single most important thing on this page.
The peoples who were raided were the peoples without kings. The Grunshi societies were decentralised — organised around earth shrines, lineages and elders rather than around a throne with a standing army. The centralised states around them were mostly not raided; they were partners, buyers, or simply too strong to be worth the loss of horsemen.
Political organisation decided who was enslaved. Not language, not religion, not geography — the presence or absence of a standing army. That is a brutal and unromantic finding, and it is the mechanism behind almost everything that happened here.
From his garrisons — including at Lalle and at Wa — Babatu's cavalry, armed with Dane guns and mounted, could break villages that had no answer to horsemen. Captives were driven south and east to markets, of which the largest was Salaga.
People without armies survive by other means. In Bulsa country, communities retreated into caverns when the raiders came — natural cavities entered through a vertical shaft and a horizontal tunnel, invisible from open ground and impossible to take on horseback. German anthropological fieldwork among the Bulsa documented these systematically, and found the same defensive type repeated across the area.
Here is what happened to them afterwards.
Many of those caves are now earth shrines, or are closely tied to them. The holes people hid their children in became sacred ground and stayed sacred for over a century. There is no monument to Babatu's victims in northern Ghana, and there does not need to be. The landscape did it itself.
Babatu's fall began with an administrative decision. Tightening central control over his territory, he ended the exemption from tribute that several of his own Grunshi supporters had enjoyed. Empires have fallen for less.
In 1895 a rebellion broke out, led by Hamaria — sometimes written Amaria — a Builsa who had risen to high rank inside the Zabarima state itself.
Think about what that means. A man from one of the peoples being hunted had climbed into the command structure of the operation hunting them, and then turned it inside out. He is not a simple hero and this site is not going to pretend he is. He is one of the most complicated figures in Ghanaian history and he has no page anywhere, in any language, that does him justice.
The end came quickly and from several directions at once. Babatu was now fighting his own former subjects, a rival warlord in Samori Touré whose armies had reached the region from the west, and three European powers — British, French and German — carving the same territory between them.
Historians of the region mark 1897 as the end of the slave raids in northern Ghana — raids that had run since 1732. A hundred and sixty-five years of it, finished in a season.
And here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and slavery across most of its empire in 1833. The raids that supplied Salaga ran for another sixty to ninety years after that, at full intensity, because the Atlantic was never the only market. What finally stopped Babatu was not abolition, not conscience and not moral pressure. It was cavalry, artillery and the colonial partition of West Africa — carried out by powers who had spent the previous two centuries buying the product.
Every year, around the third week of December, the Builsa gather at Sandema for Feok. In Buli the word means abundance of food, and the festival is in part a harvest thanksgiving to God, the ancestors and the earth shrines.
It is also, explicitly, a commemoration of the defeat of Babatu's raiders by Builsa ancestors. Warriors come out in the dress and weapons of the period. The captured Zabarima weapons held at the Azagsu shrine are part of the same memory.
Consider what that is. Across the Atlantic world, the memory of this trade is grief — a door, a dungeon, a wall of names. In Sandema, once a year, it is a party, because these are the people who won. They were hunted for generations, they hid their families in caves, and they beat the man who was doing it, on their own ground, before any European army turned up.
There is nothing else like it in Ghana's heritage calendar, and almost no foreign visitor has ever heard of it.
As on every page here, the distinction, so you know what you are reading.
The standard academic starting point is J. J. Holden's work on the Zabarima conquest of north-west Ghana, published by the Historical Society of Ghana in 1965, and the German anthropological fieldwork among the Bulsa that documented the refuge caves.
Ghana's historical roster is full of kings, and this site has pages for a great many of them. Babatu was not a king of anywhere Ghanaian, was not born here, and left nothing anybody wants to claim. He shaped the north more decisively than most of the men on the stools, and the consequences are still legible in which regions of this country are rich and which are poor. A history that only lists the founders is not a history. It is a family album.
Last verified . Principal sources: Encyclopaedia Africana; J. J. Holden, "The Zabarima Conquest of North-West Ghana", Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana (1965); published German anthropological fieldwork among the Bulsa; contemporary colonial military records. Where sources conflict, we have said so above rather than choosing the better story.