Benin 57,655 Togo 0.1 million Kingdom of Dagbon, Ghana 0.7 million | Burkina Faso 0.7 million Niger 0.1 million | |
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Gurma (also called Gourma or Gourmantché) is an ethnic group living mainly in Burkina Faso, around Fada N'Gourma, and also in northern areas of Togo and Benin, as well as southwestern Niger. They number approximately 1,750,000.
They might include the Bassaries who live in northern Togo and the Northern Volta of Kingdom of Dagbon, Ghana.
Gurma is also the name of a language spoken by the Gurma (or bigourmantcheba - as they call themselves) people, which is part of the Gur language family. See Gurmanchema language and Oti-Volta languages for related languages spoken by the Gurma.
Overview
In 1985, Dr. Richard Alan Swanson wrote a book about these people, Gourmantché Ethnoanthropology: A Theory of Human Being. The book presents Gourmantché perception of 'human being' from the perspective of the people themselves, using their own language texts to illustrate concepts. Concepts of God (Otienu), destiny (licabili), the body (gbannandi), life (limiali), death (mikuuma), and all known terms for human body parts are also discussed.
In 2006, in Burkina Faso, Salif Titamba Lankoande published a book on the History and Ethnography of the Gourmantché (“Les Gourmantche”, Presses Africaines du Burkina, Ouagadougou, 2006, 211 p.).
In 2012, the Portuguese Dr. João Pedro Galhano Alves, published in Paris a book on the Gourmantché people and culture, and on the Ethnobiology of the coexistence among humans, lions and biodiversity in the region of the W of Niger, in Niger ("Anthropologie et écosystèmes au Niger. Humains, lions et esprits de la forêt dans la culture gourmantché ", Editions l’Harmattan, Paris, 2012, 448 p.). Since 2005, he also published other books and several articles about this subject and about Gourmantché people. This publications are the result of research fieldwork made by the author in the W of Niger (Niger), between 2002 and 2010. Also, in 2010 and 2011, the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Madrid, Spain), from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spain) presented a public exhibition mainly based on the research works of this Anthropologist and Ethnobiologist, showing his main data, analysis and concepts, a selection of his photographic archive and his collection of ethnographic and ethnobiological objects collected in several research fields; One part of this exhibition was about the Gourmantché culture and the coexistence among humans, lions and biodiversity in the W of Niger; The title of this exhibition was "Vivir en biodiversidad total con leones, tigres o lobos".