Accra is one of the liveliest and most contradictory capitals in West Africa: chaotic, hot and noisy, yet warm, welcoming and bursting with energy. Born from the merging of several Ga fishing villages next to the European forts on the coast, today it's an Atlantic metropolis of overflowing markets, endless traffic, evangelical churches, new skyscrapers and a nonstop soundtrack of highlife, hiplife and afrobeats. It's the best place to take the pulse of modern Ghana.
The city holds a central place in African history: it was in Accra that Kwame Nkrumah proclaimed Ghana's independence in 1957, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to break free, lighting the fuse of decolonisation across the continent. That Pan-African legacy is palpable at the Nkrumah Memorial Park, Independence Square and the W.E.B. Du Bois Centre, and makes Accra a destination of strong symbolic weight for the African diaspora, especially since the 2019 'Year of Return'.
This guide takes a practical look at Accra: what to see between historic Jamestown and the great memorials, how to lose yourself (carefully) in Makola Market, where to eat good 'jollof' and grilled fish, how to get around safely and how to use the capital as a base for the coastal castles and the beaches to the east. With two or three well-planned days, Accra stops being just a gateway and becomes a memorable part of your trip through Ghana.
Accra grew out of several villages of the Ga people who settled by the sea centuries ago and who, in the 17th and 18th centuries, found themselves surrounded by three rival European forts: the British James Fort, the Dutch Ussher Fort and the Danish Christiansborg. The city emerged from these outposts of the gold and slave trade, and in 1877 it became the capital of the British colony of the Gold Coast. From its Independence Square, Kwame Nkrumah proclaimed Ghana's independence in 1957, and Accra became a symbol of Pan-Africanism and the nation's capital. Its full story —from the Ga villages to 'Detty December'— is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The capital and its coastline: from the Ga fishing villages and the forts of Jamestown to Nkrumah's Accra, all the way to the mouth of the Volta at Ada Foah.
Read the history of Greater Accra and the east coast →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it became a nation's capital, Accra was — and in some ways still is — a constellation of Ga villages by the sea. The Ga, a people of farmers, fishers and traders, settled on this stretch of the Gulf of Guinea coast probably around the 15th and 16th centuries, arriving from the east. They founded several coastal settlements, among them the ones that now make up the old town of Ga Mashie, with Jamestown and Ussher Town. These settlements lived from fishing, salt and trade with the interior. The name 'Accra' probably comes from 'nkran', the Akan word for soldier ants, a reference to the people who lived there.
The city's history changed course when the Europeans arrived. From the late 15th century, the Portuguese, Dutch, English, Danes and others competed in this 'Gold Coast' for the trade in gold, ivory and, more and more, human beings. In Accra that rivalry took shape as three forts built almost side by side during the 17th century: the Dutch Fort Crèvecoeur (later Ussher Fort, 1649), the English James Fort (1673) and the Danish Christiansborg (Osu Castle, expanded from 1661). Each one anchored a rival trading enclave.
The neighbourhoods that would shape the city grew up around those forts: James Town next to the English fort, Ussher Town next to the Dutch one and Osu next to the Danish one. For almost two centuries Accra was a handful of Ga villages and rival European trading posts. Gold from the interior passed through them, and so did captives bound for the Atlantic slave trade. The mark of those forts, now monuments and some in ruins, still shapes the map of old Accra.
Over the 19th century, European power on the coast passed more and more into British hands. Britain bought the Danish forts (including Christiansborg) in 1850 and the Dutch ones in 1872, and it tightened its control over the Gold Coast, which formally became a British colony in 1874. In 1877 the British moved the colony's capital from Cape Coast to Accra, drawn by its somewhat drier, healthier climate and by its location. This was the start of the city's rise.
As the colonial capital, Accra grew quickly. It gained the administration, the port, the railway to the interior (built to carry out cocoa and minerals), churches, mission schools and European residential districts. The old Danish castle of Christiansborg, in Osu, became the seat of the colonial government. The city spread beyond the old Ga neighbourhoods but kept its two-sided layout: dense, working-class African districts on one side and roomier colonial areas on the other. An earthquake in 1939 meant much of the old town had to be rebuilt.
Ghana, then called the Gold Coast, became one of the most prosperous colonies in Africa thanks to gold mining and to cocoa, of which it became the world's leading producer. That wealth fed the rise of an educated African elite, along with newspapers and associations that began to demand a bigger say and, in time, independence. As the capital, Accra was the natural stage for all this political ferment.
The road to independence sped up after the Second World War. In February 1948, in Accra, colonial police opened fire on a peaceful march of ex-servicemen who were demanding what they had been promised, and three veterans were killed (the so-called 'Christiansborg Crossroads' incident). The shooting set off riots in the city and radicalised the nationalist movement. Out of that crisis came Kwame Nkrumah, a young Pan-Africanist leader. In 1949 he founded the Convention People's Party (CPP) and launched a campaign of 'positive action', made up of strikes and civil disobedience, to demand 'self-government now'.
The British jailed Nkrumah, but his party swept the elections and he left prison to lead the government. After years of negotiation and pressure, on 6 March 1957, on Accra's old parade ground, Nkrumah declared the independence of Ghana, named after an ancient West African empire. It was the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to free itself from European rule. The event echoed across the continent and the diaspora, and Ghana became a symbol and a beacon of African decolonisation.
Nkrumah became president in 1960. He pushed ahead with major projects, among them the Akosombo Dam and Lake Volta, universities, industries and Independence Square (1961), along with a Pan-Africanist policy that sought to unite the continent. But his government slid into authoritarianism and economic trouble, and in 1966, while he was abroad, a military coup removed him from power. He died in exile in 1972. Decades later, Ghana built the memorial park that bears his name in Accra, on the very spot where he had declared freedom. Today Nkrumah is celebrated as the father of the nation and a hero of Pan-Africanism.
The decades after independence were turbulent. Ghana went through a string of coups and military governments in the middle of economic crises. The dominant figure of the 1980s and 1990s was Jerry Rawlings, an officer who seized power in 1979 and again in 1981. He ruled with a heavy hand but ended up steering the transition: a new democratic constitution was approved in 1992, and Rawlings won multi-party elections. Since then Ghana has become one of Africa's most stable democracies, with peaceful handovers of power, and Accra has been its political capital.
At the same time, the city grew explosively. It went from a few hundred thousand people at independence to several million in the metropolitan area, swallowing nearby villages and spreading inland. That growth brought huge contrasts. Well-off neighbourhoods such as Cantonments, Airport Residential and East Legon, with embassies, office towers and shopping malls, sit alongside dense, precarious settlements such as Old Fadama (Agbogbloshie), known for its huge electronic-waste dump. Traffic, strain on water and power supplies, and inequality are the capital's biggest challenges.
Today Accra is the economic and cultural engine of Ghana. It is home to the government, to banks, to universities and to a booming creative industry, and the port of Tema is close by. The city has become a reference point for afrobeats, contemporary art and West African fashion, and it draws investors, artists and visitors from across the continent and the diaspora.
In recent decades Accra has strengthened its role as the symbolic capital of Pan-Africanism and of reconnection with the diaspora. The city holds the graves of two founding figures of that idea. One is Kwame Nkrumah, in his memorial park. The other is the African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, who settled in Accra late in life and died here in 1963, in the house that is now a centre for Pan-African culture. For years Ghana has offered citizenship and other help to people of African descent who want to 'return' to the continent.
That message peaked in 2019 with the 'Year of Return', a major campaign marking 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in North America and inviting the diaspora to rediscover Ghana. The initiative drew hundreds of thousands of visitors, many of them African American and Afro-Caribbean. It gave a strong boost to heritage tourism to the coastal castles and confirmed Accra as the gateway for that reconnection. Programmes such as 'Beyond the Return' followed.
All of this also gave rise to 'Detty December'. Every December, Accra becomes one of Africa's party capitals, with afrobeats concerts, festivals, parades and a wave of returnees and tourists filling Osu, Labadi and the city's clubs. A city of Ga villages, capital of the Gold Coast, birthplace of the first African independence and today a vibrant creative metropolis, Accra sums up much of the past and present of Ghana and West Africa in its history: young, contradictory, proud and full of future.
