Ghana
The Gold Coast and West Africa's beacon of democracy
Ghana, the former British Gold Coast, holds a special place in African history as the first sub-Saharan colony to win independence, in 1957, under the pan-Africanist leader Kwame Nkrumah. Sitting on the Gulf of Guinea at the heart of West Africa's coast, it has become one of the region's most stable democracies and a steady economic performer, exporting gold, cocoa, and oil. Its roughly 35 million people, drawn from the Akan, Ewe, Ga, Dagomba, and many other groups, sustain a vibrant culture of kente cloth, highlife and Afrobeats music, and famously warm hospitality.
Ghana spreads from a low, sandy coast and the great Volta River system inland to wooded savanna and the dry northern plains near Burkina Faso. The damming of the Volta created Lake Volta, one of the largest reservoirs on Earth, which powers the Akosombo hydroelectric station. The southwest holds rainforest and the cocoa belt, and the modest Akuapim-Togo ranges along the eastern border rise to Mount Afadja at about 885 meters. Gold mining, which gave the coast its colonial name, joins cocoa, of which Ghana is the world's second-largest producer, and offshore oil to drive the economy.
Powerful states flourished here for centuries, above all the Asante Empire, whose Golden Stool remains a sacred symbol of nationhood and which fiercely resisted British conquest. European forts strung along the coast, from Cape Coast to Elmina, were grim hubs of the gold and slave trades and now stand as memorials. Independence in 1957 made Ghana a symbol of African self-determination, though it passed through coups and economic crises before settling into a durable multiparty democracy from the 1990s, with peaceful transfers of power that have made it a reference point across the continent.