Kassena
The Kassena people are an ethnic group located along the northern Ghana and Burkina Faso border. They speak the Kasem language. Their king lives in the town of Tiébélé. The Kasenna are closely related to the people of Nankanni and were brought together to form the Kassena-Nankana administrative district in 1936. As of 2008 the area comprises two districts: Kassena Nankana West and Kassena Nankana East.
History
The Kassena people are a subset of the Gurunsi meta ethnicity, a term used to describe a set of ethnic groups inhabiting northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, as well as Togo. The Gurunsi people are not actually closely related to each other and their classification as Gurunsi comes from a term used by a Djerma jihadist leader by the name of Baba Ato Zato to describe a group of soldiers recruited from multiple different ethnic groups within the same region. According to doctor Salif Titamba Lankoande, in Noms de famille au Burkina Faso, the name Gurunsi comes from the Djerma language of Niger words “Guru-si”, which means “iron does not penetrate”. It is said that during the Djerma invasions of Gurunsi lands in the late 19th century, a Baba Ato Zato recruited a battalion of indigenous men for his army, who after having consumed traditional medicines, were said to be invulnerable to iron. The term has stuck since then to refer to these people, but they are completely separate culturally and linguistically distinct ethnic groups.The Kassena people form an arc of towns mostly organized as defensive strongholds from Ouagadougou to northeast Ghana. Historically, these towns were subjects of the Mossi Empire This area became in the late 1890s part of a three-way competition between the colonial forces of the French, the British, and the Germans, trying to subdue Djerma warlords and fight also the warlike local population who resisted fiercely to maintain its autonomy, while vying to occupy as much territory as possible at the expense of rival colonial powers. Each of the three claimed part of the territory occupied by the Kassena, but the competition between the colonial powers was not resolved until the last year of the 19th century. After establishing the protectorates of Yatenga and Ouagadougou, the French annexed Kassena lands in 1897. Eventually the Germans withdrew to Togoland, and an 1898 Anglo-French agreement officially established the boundary with the Gold Coast. This partition divided the Kassena peoples among French and British administrative systems, with some Kassenas living in southern Burkina Faso, notably in the Naouhri province and the cities of Tiebele and Pô, and some living in Ghana notably in the Kassena-Nankana administrative district, Navrongo, and in the city of Paga.