When the British moved their administration to Tamale in 1907, it was a village of 1,435 people. Now it is a sprawling town of 80,000, and the morning plane from Accra swings down to land over shimmering iron rooftops, concrete offices, and a web of asphalt roads, masts, and aerials. Around Tamale stretches the flat orchard savannah of northern Ghana, a thinly populated land across which the main north road to the Upper Volta border runs as smooth and straight as the drive of a country park. To reach Dagomba villages in this country might now take as little as eight hours by jet from London: when the British first came to Tamale, the journey took a month or more.

At the time of colonial partition the Dagomba kingdom spread over some 8,000 square miles of the savannah plains. The kingdom had then been in existence for about four hundred years, ruled over by the paramount chief, the Ya-Na, from his capital at Yendi, sixty miles east of Tamale. On the eastern edge of the kingdom lay the Konkomba, a stateless people, treated as subjects of the Dagomba. The Mamprussi to the north and the Nanumba to the south were related to the Dagomba: they migrated into the area at the same time and retained myths of common origin. The other neighbours of the Dagomba – the Gonja, Tampolensi, and Chokosi – were of entirely different stock, although the principal chief of the Chokosi (the Chereponifame) had become, and still is, a member of the Dagomba State Council.