Me Man GhanaDiscover · Learn · PreserveFollow Ghana's story through its kingdoms, communities, encounters and defining moments.
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Kwame Nkrumah led the Gold Coast to independence, became Ghana's first prime minister and president, and made African unity and rapid development central to his political project.
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The shooting of unarmed Gold Coast veterans marching with a petition on 28 February 1948 triggered unrest, a colonial inquiry and a decisive new phase in the campaign for self-government.
Six leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention were detained together after the 1948 Accra riots and became known as the Big Six. Meet the men now honoured as Ghana's founding fathers, and the wider movement behind them.
On 6 March 1957, the Gold Coast became independent Ghana under Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, a landmark that energised anticolonial and Pan-African movements.
British power expanded unevenly through treaties, warfare and annexation, reshaping government and the export economy while Gold Coast communities resisted, negotiated and built new political movements.
Ghana moved through one-party government, military coups and short-lived republics before constitutional rule took root in 1992 and repeated elections enabled peaceful transfers of power.
Long before colonial rule, communities in the region now called Ghana participated in overlapping local, regional, trans-Saharan and Atlantic networks built around gold, kola, salt, cloth and other goods.
Forts on the coast of present-day Ghana became major sites in the trafficking of enslaved Africans, leaving a painful legacy that connects Ghana with communities across the Atlantic world.
The Soninke-ruled Ghana Empire flourished in the western Sahel, far from the borders of modern Ghana, and drew power from taxing the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt.
From the late seventeenth century, the Asante state united Akan polities around Kumasi and built a powerful system of government, trade, military organisation and court culture.
In 1900, Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu, became the leading symbol of Asante resistance in the war sparked by British demands concerning the sacred Golden Stool.
The Golden Stool, or Sika Dwa Kofi, is the supreme symbol of Asante unity and sovereignty; tradition holds that it embodies the collective spirit of the Asante nation.