Zongo settlements are areas in West African towns populated mostly by migrants from the northern savannah regions and the West African Sahel,[1] especially from Niger and northern Nigeria.[2]
Common features of the zongo communities are their use of Hausa language as lingua franca and their shared religion: Islam.[3] The designation of these wards of migrants as zongos derives from the Hausa word zango which literally means "a camping place for trading caravans".[4] As the name reveals, zongos were originally founded as places of trade in the long-distance trading networks that connected the West African subregion.[5]
- ^ Schildkrout, Enid (2009). People of the Zongo. Cambridge, GBR: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-55762-0. OCLC 958554015.
- ^ Cecilia Sem Obeng (1 January 2002). Home was Uncomfortable; School was Hell:In general terms, the word is used to describe an area or settlement inhabited by different tribes who got themselves resident there as a result of trading activities.The settlement may be an entire town or a part of an urban settlement. For instance, Ghana has several Zongos located within several parts of her regions. A Confessionalist-ethnographic Account of Belief Systems and Socio-educational Crisis in the Schooling of Ghanaian Rural Girls. Nova Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59033-469-0.
- ^ Pontzen, Benedikt (2021). Islam in a Zongo: Muslim Lifeworlds in Asante, Ghana. The International African Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-83024-9.
- ^ Arhin, Kwame (1979). West African Traders in Ghana in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. London: Longman. p. 6. OCLC 728719688.
- ^ Lovejoy, Paul E (1980). Caravans of kola: the Hausa kola trade, 1700-1900. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello Univ. Press. ISBN 978-978-154-568-9. OCLC 477437003.