Navrongo

The story begins on 23 April 1906, when Father Morin, Father Chollet and Brother Eugène reached the English military garrison of Navarro after a long ride south from French territory. They were White Fathers — French Canadians — who had left Upper Volta fearing anti-clerical laws, and the British allowed them to settle here on condition that any school they opened taught in English. The first Mass was said in a mud hut on 1 May 1906; a small chapel followed in 1907, a larger community chapel in 1910.

The cathedral itself was completed in August 1920, its bricks moulded at a yard on the bank of the Kansula stream and carried to the site on workers' heads. It was built of mud bricks and plastered with mud mortar, a mixture of European architecture and local construction technique, and it is the last of its kind in Ghana. The building runs 60 metres long and 14 metres wide, with a 13-metre bell tower over the entrance porch flanked by two smaller towers; the floor is a compacted blend of gravel, cow dung and dawa-dawa, the yam bean. The original flat roof was replaced in 1925 with a pitched roof of trusses and corrugated iron sheets, and the tower was designed by Father Lucien Melançon and built in 1927. In 1934 the parish, by then the Mother Parish of northern Ghana, became a cathedral.

The interior as you see it now dates from 1972, when Monsignor Kizito Avereyire prepared the church for the consecration of Bishop Rudolph Akanlu. He had seen how women in Sirigu decorated their compounds and their church, and he invited seven of them to Navrongo: Akanvole Akasise, Adumpoka Akasise, Akansaare Akabange, Alobase Asika-Kugre, Asokiwine Apisigre, Atigesama Akurugu and Akurugo Akayire. Under Akanvole Akasise's artistic leadership they worked for forty days, joined by two art students from Notre Dame Secondary School who sketched the Catholic figures. The triangular pattern that dominates the church represents femininity, charm, friendship and love; the two small lambs facing each other near the side entrance stand for peace; the undulating wave is a Nankani hairstyle called dognya. A woman pounding fufu, with small particles above her representing God, retells a legend of how humanity pushed the divine further away. The decorations were refreshed later, mostly with synthetic paints on the columns, but the original colours were respected. On 17 May 2006 the church was elevated to the status of minor basilica.

Navrongo was founded around 1740 by Butu, a Nankane-speaking hunter from Zecco in what is now southern Burkina Faso, who first settled at Pungu, a Kasem-speaking community further south. The name is an Anglicisation of navrongo: naare, foot or leg in Nankane, joined to vorongo, the sound of stepping onto muddy soil — or voro in Kasem. That is why Kasena call the town Navoro and Nankana call it Navorongo. During the nineteenth century it became an important staging post on the Sahel caravan route, and at the beginning of the twentieth century the British established a base here.

This was also slave-raiding country. Around 1840 raiders including Samori, Babatu and Bagao came through, taking people by force; captives from Burkina Faso, Mali and surrounding areas passed by Paga on their way to Salaga. In 1905 Bagao was captured, faced the firing squad and was buried under a silk cotton tree near the present District Administration offices. The British garrison that opened in Navrongo in 1904 was meant to stabilise a region still dominated by conflict and slave trading. The early twentieth century brought further blows: 1915 was the worst year of famine, when half the population of the district died and some migrated away, and the 1918 influenza epidemic killed roughly ten thousand people. The missionaries' school, which had a rocky start — the Fathers had learned the wrong local language and attracted only five students in eighteen months — was described by a British official in 1927 as the best of the five schools in the north of Ghana. After independence in 1957, Navrongo was designated district capital of the Kassena/Nankani district.

The terrain around Navrongo is flat and the ecology typical of the Sahel: arid grassland with occasional shrubbery, lying within the Guinea Savannah woodlands. The municipality covers 865 square kilometres and shares boundaries with Burkina Faso to the north; the 2021 census put its population at 99,895. The climate is tropical savanna, hot all year, with a wet season and a dry season — Navrongo recorded 43.8°C on 26 March 2017, the highest temperature ever recorded in Ghana.

Settlement here is dispersed, with individual compounds lying sixty to a hundred metres apart. Most structures are circular in plan with flat roofs, built under the direction of a mason between November and April after the harvest, with friends and relatives helping while the owner provides food and drink. Just before the rains, the women decorate the walls. The process is exacting: soft white gora earth is sifted for the first plaster layer, reliefs are shaped by hand, then a mixture of water and cow dung is applied and evened with a flat stone; a thin layer of red laterite and cow dung goes on with a grass broom, and the motifs are painted in horizontal registers in black, dark red and white talc stone, then polished and sealed with a dawa-dawa decoction of locust bean pods and bark. Women work as a team, the most experienced leading, older generations teaching younger ones. The same repertoire — about ten painted motifs, triangles and lozenges prevailing — appears inside the cathedral.

Farming still sets the calendar. The Fao festival is an annual harvest celebration held by the chiefs and peoples of Navrongo in January, observed by communities across the Kassena-Nankana Traditional Area to thank the gods and ancestors for protection through the farming season and for a bountiful harvest. It is also an occasion to promote cultural heritage, strengthen community unity and bring natives of the area together for social and development activities. The celebration centres on a durbar of chiefs and community members, with traditional drumming, dancing and cultural performances, and participants display traditional clothing and music. A 2023 account describes men and women in smocks of every size, colour and shape, war dances by warriors carrying charms and amulets, and displays said to include cutting without injury and quenching fire with the mouth. The Tono irrigation project, built between 1975 and 1985, brought 42 kilometres of canals irrigating 2,490 hectares, and the town has been linked to the national electricity supply since 1992.