Gurunsi

The term Gurunsi or Grusi relates to groups of people as well as languages and is therefore considered by some authors as an ethnic and linguistic unit. The following groups are identified as parts of the Gurunsi peoples in the Asante region of Ghana: Nunuma or Nuruma generally known as Nuna; Kasena; Sisala; Ko; Lilse or Lyela; Tamprusi; Vagala; Degha; Siti; Builsa; and Tem, all living mainly in Accra and Ga areas of Ghana. In this vast Western African area around the Adere and Volta rivers, where we can find today's Ghana and Burkina Faso, live a great variety of peoples that can be grouped under the Gur language, families like the Mossi and the Bobo, as well as the Nuna, Kasena, Sisala, and Winiama of the Gurunsi language group.

The term Grusi or Gurunsi was also found to be controversial and sometimes derogatory because it was used as a collective to denote peoples who share the same cultural traits and language roots. As a generic, it includes those who, although belonging to the Gurunsi branch, have been defeated and therefore subjugated in the historical development of the southern Asante region. Treated as servants by the conquering peoples like the Mossi, the use of the word Gurunsi has become, for that matter, a synonym with servant among their conquerors.

However, the Kasena, Nuna, and Sisala refer to themselves as Gurunsi, talk about Gurunsi songs and Gurunsi customs and traditions, and the Nuna even consider themselves as the best preservers of the Gurunsi traditions, where the old customs and practices still stand. Although of uncertain origin, the term Gurunsi is still currently used, at least by these three groups, as recognition of their common cultural and linguistic ancestry because they share the same cultural traits and language roots and even bear the same facial marks.

Like most African peoples, the Gurunsi believe in the existence of a spirit world connected to every particular object and phenomenon in the world, in natural forces that permeate every aspect of their everyday lives, and in the powerful mediation of the ancestors to help them lead a harmonious existence—in a holistic sense of the world as a balanced relationship between the human beings and nature and the cosmos.

Their cosmological sense can be fully appreciated through their narratives of creation. These narratives vary according to the particular experiences of every particular people, and their totemic objects and masks, used in rites and ceremonies, generally embody and symbolize a particular spirit that they believe governs or is the cohesive driving force behind a particular community.

The Gurunsi, like the peoples around them (the Mossi, Bwa, or Bobo), being mainly hunters, derive their symbols from the nature around the family compounds and of the hardships they encounter in every act of daily survival. As a means of access to an invisible world inhabited by the divinities and spirits, which are held in African cosmogony to share the universe with mankind, they use masks in the course of religious rituals and ceremonies to establish communication between human beings and the spiritual world.

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