Who ruled Accra?

Accra lies on a low, dry stretch of the Gulf of Guinea coast in what is now Ghana. It grew from a cluster of Ga fishing and trading towns, each of which ended up beside a European fort, and its history turns on two things: the trade in gold and enslaved people that drew those forts to the shore, and the decision in 1877 to make it the capital of the British Gold Coast, which set it on course to become the capital of one of the first African colonies south of the Sahara to win independence.

The name comes from the Akan word nkran, meaning ants, which other peoples applied to the Ga. By the 1400s a Ga kingdom ruled the coastal plain from an inland capital at Ayawaso, a few kilometres from the sea. Portuguese traders arrived on the coast in the late fifteenth century, but a small fort they built near Accra was destroyed by local people in 1576, and for decades afterwards business was done on open beaches.

In the mid-seventeenth century three European companies settled within a few kilometres of one another. The Dutch built Fort Crèvecoeur, the Swedes and then the Danes held Christiansborg at Osu, and the English put up James Fort in the 1670s. The towns that grew around them became the quarters later known as Usshertown, Christiansborg and Jamestown. Gold, ivory and, increasingly, captives sold into the Atlantic slave trade passed through all three.

Inland politics mattered as much as the forts. In 1677 the expanding Akwamu state attacked the Ga, sacked Ayawaso and killed its king, Okai Koi. The surviving Ga leadership fell back to the coast under the protection of the forts, and when the Akwamu returned in 1681 they burned the coastal towns as well. Akwamu control lasted until the state itself was broken by Akyem in 1730, after which the area fell under the influence of the Asante Empire to the north. The site's maps show the Dutch flag for much of the eighteenth century, but in practice no single European company governed the town: each held only its fort and a small surrounding district.

Britain bought out its rivals in the nineteenth century. Denmark sold its forts around 1850 and the Netherlands withdrew from the coast in the early 1870s. After a war with Asante, the British moved the colonial capital from Cape Coast to Accra in 1877, partly because its drier climate was thought healthier. A severe earthquake had already damaged the town in 1862, and another struck in 1939.

Under the British Empire Accra spread far beyond its old quarters. An outbreak of plague in 1908 led the authorities to lay out new districts such as Adabraka, and in the 1920s Governor Gordon Guggisberg built Korle Bu hospital and a bridge across the Korle Lagoon. Railways tied the city to the cocoa-growing interior, and by the inter-war years cocoa exports had made trade, rather than government, the main business of the town.

On 28 February 1948 police fired on a march of ex-servicemen from World War II who were seeking promised benefits, and several days of rioting followed in Accra and other towns. The unrest hastened constitutional change. On 6 March 1957 Kwame Nkrumah declared Ghana's independence in Accra, an early landmark of the decolonisation of Africa, and the new government filled the capital with symbols of the new nation, among them Black Star Square and its independence arch. A deep-water port opened at nearby Tema in 1961, taking over the shipping that Accra's open roadstead had once handled.

Accra is today Ghana's political, commercial and cultural centre, and the Greater Accra Region counted about 5.5 million people in the 2021 census.