Sefwi Wiawso

The land around Sefwi Wiawso was once dense forest, rich in game and fertile soil. Hunters and farmers found it first; among the early settlers was the family of Nana Kwasipanin Bumankama, remembered as the sixth king of the Sefwi area. Tradition holds that a woman of the land cleared a groundnut farm on the hilltop because it caught the sun for most of the day, and named the spot "Eyia wo so" — there is an abundance of sunlight here. That name, worn down over time, became Wiawso. Nana Bumankama is said to have killed an elephant in the highlands and built a raised platform there to dry the meat, then recognised the ridge as a defensible place to settle, with a wide view over the lowlands and any approaching enemy. The people moved up, and the settlement they made has become the town you see today.

The wider Sefwi story is one of refuge and mixing. From the middle of the seventeenth century this forest country welcomed people fleeing the wars and centralising politics of their neighbours to the north and east — Bono-Takyiman, Wenchi, Adanse, Denkyira, Assin and Asante. The name Sefwi itself is often explained as a contraction of the Twi phrase "Esa awie", meaning "war is over". The Aowin rulers who had controlled the territory before adopted an open-door policy to build up their population, and the newcomers' language was overlaid so heavily by the Aowin-Bono dialect that Sefwi today is largely unintelligible to other Twi speakers. Gold, ivory and later rubber and cocoa drew traders along the route from Kumasi, and the forest has kept drawing people ever since.

Modern Sefwi Wiawso carries two histories at once. It is an old royal and farming town, and it is a young capital: in February 2019 the President named Sefwi-Wiawso as the capital of the newly created Western North Region, one of six new regions carved out of existing ones. The region was created by Constitutional Instrument 117, decided by referendum on 27 December 2018, and formally inaugurated in April 2019. The reason given was practical — the people of Sefwi had long found it hard to reach government services in the old regional capital, Sekondi-Takoradi, far to the south.

Sefwi Wiawso is the seat of the Omanhene of the Sefwi-Wiawso Traditional Area, Katakyie Kwasi Bumangamah II, whose palace and council grounds are the ceremonial heart of the town. The Sefwi are an Akan people, and collectively they are made up of three traditional states — Anhwiaso, Bekwai and Wiawso — each with its own independent paramount chief, sharing a common deity, Sobore, and a common yam festival. The Western North Region as a whole has six paramountcies, and the Sefwi Wiawso Traditional Council remains a real force in local life, settling disputes and convening the community.

Farming is the town's backbone. Around 80 per cent of the working population is employed in agriculture, and cocoa is the dominant cash crop; the wider Sefwi area is one of Ghana's leading cocoa producers, and the region's rainfall and forest ochrosol soils suit it well. Timber, cashew and food crops such as plantain, cocoyam and cassava round out the picture. The Paramount Chief has publicly pushed for a cocoa processing industry to be established locally, arguing that the ambition long predates any single government — a reminder that this is a place that grows the raw material but wants more of the value to stay at home.

One of the more unexpected threads in Sefwi Wiawso's life is its Jewish community, known as the House of Israel, which maintains the Sefwi Wiawso Synagogue. It is a small, distinctive presence in a predominantly Christian and Muslim town, and a reminder that this forest capital has always been a place where people arrive, settle and make something new. Alongside it, the town's Muslim community gathers at the central mosque in Sefwi Dwenase, and the main market there trades in produce, foodstuffs, clothing and household goods — the everyday meeting point of the conurbation.

Sefwi Wiawso sits in one of the wettest parts of Ghana. The Western North Region has a double-maxima rainfall pattern averaging around 1,600 mm a year, with peaks between May and July and again in September and October, and humidity that can reach 90 per cent at night. Temperatures are moderate for the tropics, roughly 22°C at night to 34°C by day. About three-quarters of the region lies within Ghana's high forest zone, and the vegetation is moist semi-deciduous forest, thick with wawa, mahogany, esa, ofram, edinam, onyina, kyenkyen and odum. The relief is a dissected forest plateau, mostly a plain between about 240 and 300 metres above sea level with isolated hills; the Krokoa peak, roughly 510 metres, lies to the south-west of town.

Three of Ghana's major rivers rise or flow through this region — the Ankobra, the Tano and the Bia. The Ankobra takes its source in the Merewa forest reserves north-east of Wiawso and runs about 190 kilometres south to the Gulf of Guinea. The Tano, the westernmost, rises near Techiman and forms the last stretch of the international boundary with Côte d'Ivoire. The Bia gives its name to the park.

That park is the reason many travellers come. Bia National Park is the northern 77.7 square kilometres of the Bia Conservation Area, a twin protected area of about 306 square kilometres that also includes the Bia Resource Reserve to the south. It sits in the transition zone between moist evergreen forest and moist semi-deciduous forest, and it was Ghana's first UNESCO-recognised biosphere reserve. Sixty-two species of mammals have been recorded, including ten primates — black-and-white colobus, olive colobus, red colobus and chimpanzees among them — as well as forest elephant and the highly threatened bongo. Over 160 bird species have been logged, including the internationally endangered white-breasted guinea fowl, and the park is the only known home of Agama sylvanus, a newly discovered lizard. The forest is dense, so sightings take patience, and the Forestry Commission notes that tourist infrastructure at the park itself is essentially non-existent — the nearest place to stay overnight is Sefwi Wiawso, about 100 kilometres from the park headquarters.