The Akan people are an ethnic group that was originally from the Empires of Ghana and Mali. With the encroachment of Islam they left the Sahel and traveled through the forest to modern day Central Volta and they settled just South of the Black Volta River where they established Bono State which is also referred to as the Bonoman Kingdom and a town called Bono-Manso (I noticed the Manso is very similar to Mansa). Anyway once they were there the Akan started having differences of opinions, mostly because one of the subgroups of the Akan (the Ashanti) began to dominate the other Akan subgroups (Denkyira, Fante, Baoule, etc). Some of the conflict stemmed from gold mining, taxation and the fact that the Akan people who were in the modern day country of Central Ghana, needed but did not have access to the coast were the Europeans had come to trade.
One group of the Akan groups called the Baoule could read the writing on the wall and they knew to run while the getting was good, because the Ashanti were very warlike. So the Baoule and other smaller Akan groups fled to the West of Bonoman and established the Baoule Kingdom which is in modern day Ivory Coast. That is Ghana and Ivory Coast are so similar and they both also have Muslims in the North.
Back in Bonoman the Ashanti launched attacks on the people in their South in order to gain access to the ocean for trade. They were able to subdue the Ewe/Ga people and capture Accra. Over time the Ashanti waged 5 wars against the English, wherein they won 3 of them. The Ashanti also waged war against the Dagomba who are another group in Central and Northern Ghana ethnic group. During the conflict Ashanti captured the Dagomba King and they had intended to sell him into slavery unless his Kingdom agredd to pay an annual tribute in gold. Dagomba could not pay in gold, but they negotiated slaves as payments instead. Based upon that agreement the Dagomba and their related tribes of Mamprussi and the Mossi carried out wars into Muslim Northern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso to capture people and pay the tribute. The Ashanti in turn sold the captured people to the Europeans. That in a nutshell is gold trading and slave trading on the Gold Coast and the formation of Ivory Coast. The irony is that gold trading is the reason that people were on the Gold Coast, rather than slave trading but the dungeons in Ghana are still major sites for slave trading tourism. However Ghana, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Senegal probably only produced about 25%-30% of all slaves combined and and even those percentages are too high because no one counted the people that were made prisoners of war. The vast majority of all slaves (70%+) came from the modern day countries of Nigeria, Cameroon, Congos and Angola. So Ghana has a nice little hustle going regarding slave tourism.
