People & Culture

Long before any European ship reached this coast, the savanna and forest belts that became Ghana were already stitched into a continental economy. In the centuries after 1100, Begho grew into an entrepot on the edge of the Akan forest, gold moving north through Kong and Bobo-Dioulasso to the Sahelian markets of Djenne and Timbuktu and on across the Sahara toward the Mediterranean. Bono Manso, capital of the Bono state south of the Black Volta, played the same role from the other side of the trade, dealing in gold, kola nuts, salt, leather and cloth in both directions. This was gold country, and the wealth of it drew traders long before it drew flags. Further north, a different set of states had formed around the Mole-Dagbani peoples, who trace their descent to Naa Gbewaa, remembered as the founder of the kingdom of Dagbon. The Yaa Naa, ruler of Dagbon, still resides at the Gbewaa Palace in Yendi, and the line runs back through oral history to roughly the thirteenth century, when Mole-Dagbani ancestors are thought to have moved south from near Lake Chad. In the forest to the south, Akan polities rose and fell on the strength of gold and manpower. Akwamu, founded by migrants from the northern Akan region around 1500, became the first African state to control an extensive stretch of this coast, and by the 1670s and 1680s, under King Ansa Sasraku, it ran some four hundred kilometres of the Gulf of Guinea coastline from Ouidah to Winneba. Denkyira rose through the same gold trade, dealing heavily with the Dutch, and for a time stood as overlord of the Akan states to its east. That changed in 1701, when an alliance led by Osei Tutu, assisted by his priest Okomfo Anokye, defeated Denkyira at the Battle of Feyiase and founded the Asante union in its place. Tradition holds that Okomfo Anokye called the Golden Stool down from the sky to land on Osei Tutu's lap, and bound the allied chiefs to it with their own hair and nail clippings so that it came to hold the soul of the Asante nation rather than the person of any king. No one sits on it, and it has never touched the ground. From Feyiase, Asante expanded outward, defeating Akyem in 1742 after Akyem and its allies had already broken Akwamu around 1730, and by the eighteenth century Asante stood as the dominant power of the forest interior, ruling from Kumasi. Historians still argue over how much of that rise came from the gold and kola trade the Asante state controlled and how much from straightforward military conquest, a debate running from Ivor Wilks's account of a deliberately built bureaucratic state to later scholars who doubt that its commercial monopoly was ever as complete as Wilks described. On the coast itself, other peoples held their own ground and struck their own bargains with the Europeans arriving by sea. The Ga settled around what became Accra, organising into a cluster of towns, among them Accra proper, Osu, La, Teshie, Nungua and Tema, each built around its own ritual stool, and absorbing Guan communities who had preceded them there. East along the coast, the Anlo Ewe trace their arrival to around 1474, after fleeing an oppressive rule at Notsie in what is now Togo, a flight still marked every year in the Hogbetsotso festival. The Portuguese reached this coast in 1471 and found a gold trade already running through Arab and Berber hands as well as African ones. In January 1482 they began building Elmina Castle, still the oldest surviving European structure in Africa south of the Sahara, to secure that trade rather than to start a new one. Within two centuries the purpose of these forts had shifted from gold to people. The Dutch seized Elmina from the Portuguese in 1637. The Swedes put up Fort Carolusborg at Cape Coast in 1653, which passed through Danish and Dutch hands before the British took it in 1664 and turned it into Cape Coast Castle, seat of the Gold Coast colony and a major point of departure in the trade. The Danes ran their own network of forts from 1658, centred on Fort Christiansborg, until they sold the lot to Britain in 1850. The Brandenburgers held a foothold from 1682 around Fort Gross Friedrichsburg before the Dutch bought them out in 1717, and in 1867 Britain and the Netherlands traded their remaining forts between them to consolidate their zones. This is where the plain fact has to be stated: Akan and other coastal polities were not passive victims of this trade. They captured, marched and sold people into it as one strand of a commerce they otherwise ran on their own side of the beach, even as the demand, ships, credit and firepower behind it were European, and historians continue to argue over how to weigh African agency against that structural dominance without letting either point excuse the other. How many people left this coast in chains is also disputed, since aggregate estimates for West Africa run into the millions while regional breakdowns for the Gold Coast rest on incomplete shipping records, so no visitor should treat any single number as settled. Asante's long rivalry with Britain over control of the coastal trade hardened into open war across the nineteenth century, five conflicts in all. The third of them ended in February 1874 with British troops burning Kumasi and imposing a gold indemnity, though Britain held back from annexing the Asante heartland outright. That restraint did not last. After a further war, the Asantehene Prempeh I was deposed and in 1896 sent into exile in the Seychelles, where he remained until 1924. In 1900, when the British governor demanded the right to sit on the Golden Stool, Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of Ejisu, took command of the Asante resistance herself, and the ensuing War of the Golden Stool cost lives on both sides before her capture and exile in 1901. Full colonial rule followed, and the Gold Coast became one of Britain's more commercially productive African possessions, not least because of cocoa, brought home from Fernando Po by Tetteh Quarshie in 1876, so that by 1911 the colony had become the world's largest cocoa producer. Colonial rule frayed after the Second World War. On 28 February 1948 police fired on a march of ex-servicemen demanding their war benefits, and the riots that followed in Accra and beyond pushed the British to arrest six nationalist leaders, among them Kwame Nkrumah, J.B. Danquah and Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, a group remembered as the Big Six. Nkrumah broke from the older United Gold Coast Convention in 1949 to found the Convention People's Party on the slogan of self government now, and after boycotts and strikes through 1950, the Gold Coast became Ghana on 6 March 1957, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence. Nkrumah's government fell to a military coup on 24 February 1966, an event historians still read two ways, either as a homegrown reaction against one-party rule and economic strain, or as a move encouraged from outside by a United States uneasy with his politics and regional ambitions, and declassified American records support elements of both readings without settling the question. None of that history is behind glass. Kumasi remains the seat of a functioning monarchy: the Manhyia Palace was built in 1925 for Prempeh I on his return from exile, later became a museum once a new palace was built for his successors, and today the reigning Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, holds court there and presides over festivals such as the Adae Kese. Elmina and Cape Coast castles now operate as museums and UNESCO World Heritage Sites, their dungeons and the narrow Door of No Return open to visitors. The 2019 Year of Return, marking four centuries since the first enslaved Africans reached Virginia, drew large numbers of diaspora visitors through them, and both castles are treated as places of mourning rather than sightseeing, which calls for quiet, modest dress and restraint with cameras in the dungeons. In the north, the Larabanga mosque, built of mud and reeds in the Sudanic style and wrapped in its own founding legend, stands as one of Ghana's oldest mosques, rebuilt after a 2002 storm exposed decades of hidden rot under a cement coating from earlier repairs. The Volta region and the estuary town of Ada Foah, once a Dutch trading port that faded when cocoa began moving by road instead of river, carry Ewe and Adangbe history along the water rather than in stone. At Bonwire, weavers still work the kente loom said to have been learned from watching a spider spin its web, and at Ntonso, north of Kumasi, cloth is still hand stamped with adinkra symbols whose origin is tied to the 1818 defeat of the Gyaman king Kofi Adinkra, patterns that once marked funerals alone and now travel far beyond them. None of this asks to be watched from a distance. Where a chief is present, greet the chief first before anyone else, and anywhere else greet from right to left. Use the right hand for handshakes, for giving and for eating, since the left is associated with bathroom hygiene and offering it is read as an insult, and when greeting an elder, support your own right forearm with your left hand and bow the head slightly as you do. At the castles, ask before photographing inside the dungeons, and speak of the slave trade as something that happened here, to specific people whose names mostly went unrecorded, rather than as a general tragedy passed through on a tour.