Miti di fondazione e cronologie in Africa occidentale. Elementi di storia locale kassena

Abstract

This article deals with some aspects of the history of the Kassena, a West African people settled in Northern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso. Among the Kassena, myths of foundation – which are here labelled “etiological tales” - tell the origins of local communities and chiefdoms, whereas no unitary and shared account is available that provides some explanation of their common origins as an ethnic group. As part of an ongoing attempt to investigate the history of this people by interpreting a corpus of etiological tales and by taking into consideration the chronologies of chiefs, this article outlines a method that might be helpful, through further developments, in order to connect different local accounts in a single frame.