![]() A person who seized power without being properly chosen and without the correct rituals of installation would not be regarded as a real ruler by the Mossi. A Naba is a man who has been properly installed as ruler by the community and thereby has been granted the nam, which is the religious power to rule other people. There is one word for all these rulers-kings, district chiefs, and village chiefs: Naba. Within such areas, groups of up to 20 villages were ruled by a district chief, and each village had its own chief. ![]() Each kingdom was ruled by a king, with a court of officials who were responsible for various functions, such as defense, and who governed different areas of the kingdom. All of them together are sometimes described as “the Mossi empire,” but there has never been a time when all the Mossi were unified under one ruler. The Mossi were organized into three kingdoms, Tenkodogo, Wagadugu, and Yatenga, along with a number of buffer states around their edges. Mossi men also traveled widely as traders and as soldiers in the French army. ![]() The demand for labor on the mainly African-owned coffee and cocoa farms in the coastal forest in those countries coincided with the dry season in the savanna of Burkina Faso, so Mossi men could migrate south between growing seasons and bring money back to their families. As little was grown or mined in Mossi country that the French wanted to buy, many Mossi were forced to migrate to the Ivory Coast (then a French colony) and the neighboring British Gold Coast (now Ghana) to earn money there. By making the Mossi pay in French money, the colonial government required them to grow, dig, make, or do something the French were willing to pay for. Traditional Mossi taxes to chiefs and kings had been paid in goods, and cowrie shells had served as money. In less than 10 years after the first conquest, the French demanded that the Mossi pay taxes in French francs. Like the other colonial powers, the French wanted their colonies to generate money for their European homeland. Mossi migration increased notably after the French conquest of the Mossi in 1896–97 the Mossi were one of the last peoples in Africa to be brought under colonial rule. From the beginning, the Mossi people moved, and their idea of society included people moving in, out, and around. The Mossi's story of their origins involves the conquest of native farming peoples by immigrant cavalry soldiers from the northeast, toward what is now northern Nigeria. Mossi culture nonetheless shows Muslim influences. The three Mossi kingdoms were known for their resistance to Islam in a region where all other kingdoms and empires were Muslim, at least in their ruling elites, after about the 10th century. The Mossi occupied the interior lands within the “boucle de Niger” (“great loop of the Niger River”) and thus controlled trade between the empires along the great Niger River and the forest kingdoms to their south. Because of extensive migration to more prosperous neighboring countries, Mossi also are the second-largest ethnic group in Côte d'Ivoire ( Ivory Coast). The Mossi make up the largest ethnic group in Burkina Faso. PRONUNCIATION: MOH-say ALTERNATE NAMES: Moose, Moshi, Mosi LOCATION: Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire POPULATION: 5 to 6 million in Burkina Faso, 1.2 million in Côte d'Ivoire LANGUAGE: Moré RELIGION: traditional religion (3 main components: creator, fertility spirits, ancestors) RELATED ARTICLES: Vol.
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