Gold Coast Colony

The Gold Coast was the British colony on the coast of what is now Ghana, and the first African colony south of the Sahara to become independent. Europeans had traded there since the fifteenth century for the gold that named it and then for people; the coast carries more surviving slave forts than anywhere else in Africa, Elmina being the oldest European building south of the Sahara. Britain took the coastal settlements as a colony in 1874 and spent the following twenty-five years fighting the Asante confederation inland, whose army had beaten British forces more than once. The last war, in 1900, began when a governor demanded to sit on the Golden Stool, the shrine of the Asante nation, and was fought largely by an army raised by the queen mother Yaa Asantewaa. Asante was annexed in 1902. Cocoa transformed the economy from the 1890s, grown by African smallholders rather than on plantations, and the Gold Coast became the world's largest producer. That created a prosperous farming class and a literate urban one. Kwame Nkrumah returned in 1947, built the Convention People's Party, was imprisoned, and won the 1951 election from his cell. Britain released him to form a government. Independence came on 6 March 1957 under the name Ghana, taken from a medieval empire that lay elsewhere. Yaa Asantewaa was exiled to the Seychelles and died there. The Golden Stool was never surrendered and is still held by the Asante. Nkrumah's party won three elections while he was in or just out of prison. Ghana's independence made him the leading advocate of pan-Africanism for a decade.

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