Britain was on the Gold Coast for more than 300 years: first as a slave trader in a few coastal forts, then as a conqueror that fought Asante for most of a century, and finally as a colonial power that grew rich on cocoa and gold. In 1957 the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first colony south of the Sahara to win its independence.
Europeans came to this coast for gold, which is how it got its name. The Portuguese built Elmina in 1482. The Dutch, the Danes, the Swedes, the Brandenburgers and the English followed, crowding more than 30 forts and lodges onto about 500 kilometres of coast. None of them ruled the country. The land around the forts belonged to African states, which charged rent, and the Europeans needed their goodwill to trade.
From the late 17th century the main trade became human beings. The Royal African Company and its successor, the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, ran the English forts. Captives were held in the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle and shipped to the Caribbean and America. Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, and in 1821 the government took the forts away from the merchants and placed them under the governor of Sierra Leone.
In 1824 the governor, Sir Charles MacCarthy, marched against Asante and was killed at the battle of Nsamankow. It was the first of a long series of wars.
The coastal Fante states feared Asante, the powerful kingdom inland. On 6 March 1844 a group of Fante and other coastal chiefs signed what became known as the Bond of 1844 with the British. In theory it gave Britain only limited powers, mostly to try murder and robbery cases. In practice the British treated it as the first step towards ruling the coast.
Britain then bought out its European rivals. In 1850 Denmark sold its forts, including Christiansborg in Accra, for £10,000. In 1867 Britain and the Netherlands swapped forts so that each had its own stretch of coast. In 1871 the Dutch agreed to hand over everything, and in April 1872 Elmina, the oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa, flew the British flag.
In 1873–74 a British army under Sir Garnet Wolseley invaded Asante and burned Kumasi. On 24 July 1874 Britain proclaimed the Gold Coast a Crown colony. The coastal peoples had not been asked. Britain simply set aside the Bond of 1844 and treated its signatories as if they had been conquered. The capital later moved from Cape Coast to Accra.
Asante was one of the strongest states in West Africa, with a capital, a civil service and an army that had beaten the British before. It took Britain almost 80 years to bring it down.
In January 1896 a British expedition marched into Kumasi without a fight. King Prempeh I tried to solve the crisis by diplomacy. He was arrested, held at Elmina Castle, sent to Sierra Leone and then into exile in the Seychelles. He was not allowed home until 1924, and even then only as ruler of Kumasi, not as king of all Asante.
In 1900 the British governor, Sir Frederick Hodgson, came to Kumasi and demanded the Golden Stool, the sacred symbol of the Asante nation, so that he could sit on it. The answer was war. It was led by Nana Yaa Asantewaa, the Queen Mother of Ejisu, then about 60 years old, with an army of some 5,000. The British were besieged in Kumasi Fort for months. When the war ended, Yaa Asantewaa and other leaders were sent to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921. But the British never got the Golden Stool, and it is still used to enstool the Asantehene today.
On 1 January 1902 Britain formally annexed Asante, and the Northern Territories became a British protectorate. Ghana's present borders were completed after the First World War, when Britain took over the western part of German Togoland.
The Gold Coast made Britain money, but not through British plantations. Cocoa was brought in by a Ghanaian, the blacksmith Tetteh Quarshie, who planted it at Mampong in the Akuapem hills around 1879. African farmers did the rest. By 1911 the Gold Coast was the world's largest cocoa producer, and it stayed at or near the top for decades. Gold mining was taken over by British companies from the 1890s.
The best-known governor was Sir Gordon Guggisberg (1919–1927), a Canadian-born army engineer. His Ten-Year Development Plan built the deep-water harbour at Takoradi, finished in 1928, plus roads and railways. He opened Achimota College in 1927, which later gave rise to the University of Ghana, and completed the plans for Korle Bu Hospital in Accra. Ghanaians still speak of him with respect. But his roads and railways were built to get cocoa, gold and timber to the ships, and the profit went mostly to British trading firms.
Cocoa farmers knew it. They held back their crops in protest against the low prices paid by the big European buying firms, most famously in the cocoa hold-up of 1937–38.
Gold Coast soldiers fought for Britain in East Africa and Burma in the Second World War. On 28 February 1948 a peaceful march of ex-servicemen to Christiansborg Castle in Accra, demanding the pensions and jobs they had been promised, was stopped at the crossroads by police. A British officer opened fire. Sergeant Adjetey, Corporal Attipoe and Private Odartey Lamptey were killed, and riots followed across the colony.
Britain arrested the leaders of the nationalist United Gold Coast Convention, among them Kwame Nkrumah, who had come home from London only months earlier. In 1949 Nkrumah broke away to form the Convention People's Party with the slogan "Self-Government Now". He was jailed in 1950, and in February 1951 his party won the election while he was still in prison. The governor had to release him to lead the government.
On 9 May 1956 British Togoland voted to join the Gold Coast. At midnight on 5–6 March 1957, at the Old Polo Grounds in Accra, Nkrumah declared that "Ghana, your beloved country, is free forever". The new state took its name from the old Ghana empire of the western Sahel. Its independence encouraged freedom movements across the whole continent.
Everything on this page can be visited in Ghana, and our sister site Ghana-Net covers it from the ground:
The Colonial Office records on the Gold Coast are at The National Archives in Kew, open to anyone with a free reader's ticket. Asante gold is in the British Museum and the V&A. Nkrumah's London years can be traced in Camden and around Euston.
Fly into Accra International Airport. Cape Coast and Elmina are about three hours west along the coast; Kumasi is about five hours inland by road, or a short domestic flight. In Accra, see Jamestown and James Fort, the Christiansborg crossroads and the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, where he is buried.
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome.
Accra and the coastal forts:
Kumasi and the Asante heartland:
In London:
All of Britain's African territories, country by country.
The neighbouring colony that followed Ghana in 1960.
The slave-trading company behind the British forts.
The years in Britain that shaped Ghana's first leader.
The men whose 1948 march started the end of empire.
The story after independence.
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