Nakore Mosque

What it is

Nakore sits a short drive south-west of Wa, and its mosque belongs to a family of buildings that has a better claim to be Ghana's oldest surviving architecture than anything on the coast: the earth mosques of the north, built in the Sudanic-Sahelian tradition that runs from Djenné in Mali across the Sahel and down into Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and northern Ghana.

It is rectangular, its roof carried on internal timber posts rather than on the walls. Two pyramidal towers rise from it — the minaret and the mihrab, the latter marking the direction of Mecca. Around the outside run heavy buttresses whose pinnacles project above the parapet, and out of the walls stick the ends of horizontal timbers.

Those timbers are the whole story of the building. They are structural, and they are also the permanent scaffolding. When the mud coat is renewed after the rains, the community climbs on them. A building of earth survives only because people come back to it every single year — which means Nakore has stood because generations in this village decided, over and over, that it should.

How Islam reached here

Islam arrived in West Africa with trade, not with armies. It reached Egypt in the seventh century, spread west along the North African coast, and crossed the Sahara from the eighth and ninth centuries onward along the caravan routes that carried gold, salt and enslaved people between the Sahel and the Mediterranean.

Mande merchants, scholars and clerics travelled those routes. At the market towns and resting places along them, communities converted, and where there were Muslims there were mosques. Wa and its surroundings became one of those centres, with a Muslim scholarly tradition that long predates any European presence in what is now Ghana.

By the seventeenth century, Islamic settlement in this area was firmly established, and the surviving earth mosques of the north belong to the centuries that follow.

It is a working mosque

This is not a monument with a custodian. On Fridays and at religious festivals the community gathers here for prayer and Qur'anic readings, and it serves as a place of pilgrimage for Muslims in the region.

Private readings are arranged through the chief imam for people facing serious difficulty or seeking protection before a journey or a venture. In return the imam will normally ask for the sacrifice of a cow or other donations to the community — which is, in practice, part of how the building is kept standing.

That matters more than it sounds. Of the old earth mosques of the Waala kingdom, Nakore is the one that never stopped being used and cared for. The other two were not so lucky: Wechiau was abandoned in the 1990s and Dondoli fell into ruin, until both were taken into a restoration project in 2023–24.

All nine ancient mosques, region by region→

Visiting

• Ask before you do anything. Before entering the compound, before photographing the building, and certainly before photographing any person. Accept a refusal without argument.
• Access to the interior is usually restricted to Muslims, as it is at Larabanga. Expect to see the exterior and to have it explained to you.
• Do not arrive at prayer time expecting a tour. Mid-morning is a safer bet.
• Dress modestly — covered shoulders and legs, for men as well as women.
• Bring cash in small notes. There is no ticket office and no fixed fee. A contribution to the mosque, and something for whoever shows you around, is the right thing to do and the only income the site produces.
• Do not climb on the buttresses or the projecting timbers. They are the structure.
• Allow an hour. Less and you are ticking a box.

Getting there

Wa, capital of the Upper West→

Combine it with

• Dondoli Mosque — a nineteenth-century mosque in Wa itself, within walking distance of the Wa Naa's Palace, and the easiest of the group to reach. Long a ruin, taken into a restoration project in 2023–24.
• Wechiau Mosque — in the same district as the Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary on the Black Volta, which makes for a natural two-in-one day. Abandoned in the 1990s and restored in earth in early 2024.
• Gbele Resource Reserve — the Upper West's protected area, quiet and rarely visited.
• Larabanga Mosque — the famous one, on the way to Mole if you are heading east.
• Bole, Banda Nkwanta and Maluwe — the old Gonja mosques of the Savannah Region, and the site of the lost mosque at Dakrupe.
• Wuriyanga — the only Djenné-type mosque in Ghana, near Garu in the far north-east.
• All nine ancient mosques of Ghana — the full status report, region by region.
• Bolgatanga — across in the Upper East, for crafts, and further on for Paga and Pikworo.
• All sixteen regions and their capitals

Guided tours in Ghana

For Nakore itself, arrange locally in Wa — no international operator runs this. For the wider country, the tours below are bookable in advance.