44 Fun Facts About Ghana

What is the capital and most populous city of Ghana?

Accra, on the Atlantic coast, has a metropolitan population of roughly 4 million and became the colonial capital in 1877, when the British moved their administration there from Cape Coast.

What did Ghana do on 6 March 1957?

Achieve sovereignty: yet for its first three years Elizabeth II remained its head of state, with a governor-general standing in for her.

By what name was Ghana known as a British colony?

Gold Coast: the colony was named for the gold that drew European traders, and at independence it took the name of Ghana, an ancient Sahel empire.

Who led Ghana to independence and served as its first prime minister and president?

Kwame Nkrumah founded the Convention People's Party in 1949 under the slogan 'Self-Government Now', led the country to independence in 1957 and was overthrown by a coup in February 1966.

Clips of Ghana's dancing pallbearers became a 2020 meme set to which EDM track?

Astronomia: families pay the pallbearers extra to dance, sending loved ones off in style rather than in mourning.

The black star on Ghana's flag symbolises what?

African emancipation: the star stands for Africa's freedom from colonial rule, and Ghana's football team took its nickname, the Black Stars, from it.

Which club based in Kumasi is Ghana's most successful, with more than 20 league titles?

Asante Kotoko's 2001 match against Hearts of Oak ended in a deadly stampede after police fired tear gas into the crowd.

Whose goal-line handball denied Ghana a late winner in the 2010 World Cup quarter-finals?

Luis Suárez blocked Dominic Adiyiah's header with his hands and was sent off, but Asamoah Gyan hit the crossbar with the penalty and Uruguay won the shoot-out 4–2.

What happened to the original Africa Cup of Nations trophy after Ghana's third title in 1978?

They kept it for good as the first three-time champions, so a new trophy, the African Unity Cup, was introduced from 1980.

Which farmer is credited with founding Ghana's cocoa industry at Mampong, Akuapem, in 1879?

Tetteh Quarshie planted seeds he had brought back from the island of Fernando Po, now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea.

In 2019, Ghana overtook whom as the continent's top gold producer?

South Africa owed its gold boom to the 1886 Witwatersrand gold rush, which led to the founding of Johannesburg.

Lake Volta, formed by the Akosombo Dam, holds what world record?

Largest reservoir by surface area: filling Lake Volta flooded hundreds of villages and forced nearly 80,000 people to resettle.

The Asante Golden Stool is said to have fallen from the sky onto the lap of which first king?

Osei Tutu is said to have received it through the priest Okomfo Anokye, and the Asante hid it so well that the British never captured it.

The 1900 War of the Golden Stool began after Governor Frederick Hodgson demanded what?

To sit on it: Hodgson also ordered a search for the stool, and the Asante rose in 1900 and besieged the British fort at Kumasi.

Yaa Asantewaa, who commanded the Asante in the 1900 war against the British, held which position?

Queen mother of Ejisu: Yaa Asantewaa shamed hesitant chiefs into fighting, and after the defeat the British exiled her to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921.

Elmina Castle, begun by the Portuguese in 1482, holds what distinction?

Oldest European building in sub-Saharan Africa: the Dutch later seized it from the Portuguese, and in 1872 they handed it to Britain.

Which nation's company built Cape Coast Castle as a timber fort in the 1650s?

Sweden: yet Hendrik Carloff, who had founded the Swedish colony, later came back in Danish service and seized the fort.

By Asante tradition, kente cloth originated in which town?

Bonwire: yet kente is not Asante cloth alone, since the Ewe people of southern Ghana weave their own kente too.

Ghana's adinkra symbols often carry meanings drawn from what?

A proverb or historical event: Sankofa, drawn as a backward-looking bird or a heart, became a diaspora symbol engraved at the African Burial Ground memorial.

Jerry Rawlings, who ruled Ghana in 1979 and from 1981 to 2001, came to power holding what military rank?

Flight lieutenant: Rawlings kept the junior air force rank through both his coups (1979 and 1981) and his years as head of state, before winning the 1992 election that launched the Fourth Republic.

The 1966 coup that overthrew Ghana's first president was code-named what?

Operation Cold Chop: the plotters struck while the president was abroad on a mission to North Vietnam and China, then ruled as the National Liberation Council.

Ghana's currency is called what?

Cedi: decades of inflation led Ghana in 2007 to swap 10,000 old cedis for one new Ghana cedi.

Ghana lies on which body of water?

Gulf of Guinea: Ghana struck oil beneath its waters in 2007, when the offshore Jubilee field was discovered.

The Prime Meridian passes through which Ghanaian port town, near the capital?

Tema: the port city was built on the site of the fishing village of Torman, whose people were moved out to a new site nearby.

Which is the largest ethnic group in Ghana?

Akan: the Asante, one of its peoples, built their own empire around Kumasi.

Which religion do about seven in ten Ghanaians follow?

Christianity: yet Islam reached Ghana first, brought by Muslim traders from the Sahel.

Highlife, Ghana's guitar-and-horn dance genre, first emerged in which part of the country?

Ghana's coastal cities: in the 1990s, Ghanaian artists mixed highlife with hip hop to create hiplife.

The trickster Anansi of Ghanaian folklore is most commonly depicted as what creature?

A spider: Anansi's tales crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans and live on in Caribbean folklore as the Anancy stories.

Kakum National Park's best-known attraction is what?

A canopy walkway: Kakum's 350-metre walkway, opened in 1995, hangs about 40 metres above the forest floor on a chain of seven suspension bridges between treetops.

The nationalist convention formed in August 1947 to seek self-government was led by which group?

The Big Six: the colonial government blamed the convention for the 1948 riots and arrested all six of its leaders.

In 1983, which West African country expelled about a million Ghanaian migrants?

Nigeria: over a decade earlier, Ghana had forced out Nigerian migrants under its own Aliens Compliance Order.

Ghana in 1957 unified the coastal colony, Ashanti, the Northern Territories and what else?

British Togoland: in a May 1956 plebiscite 58% of its voters chose union, so it joined the new state at independence.

Which Asante king did the British exile to the Seychelles?

Prempeh I: allowed home in 1924, he was recognised only as ruler of Kumasi, not as king of all the Asante.

The 1481 commission to build Elmina Castle came from which king?

John II of Portugal: around 1484 his advisers turned down Columbus's plan to reach the Indies by sailing west.

The 2000 election of John Kufuor marked the first time under the Fourth Republic that what happened?

Power passed between elected leaders: the run-off loser, John Atta Mills, lost again in 2004 but finally won the 2008 election.

The staple rice dish waakye combines rice with what?

Beans: sorghum leaves cooked in the pot with the rice and beans give waakye its reddish colour.

Ghana's Kofi Annan training centre reflects the country's long involvement in what?

Peacekeeping: in 1994 Ghanaian troops stayed on in Rwanda during the genocide, sheltering thousands, after others withdrew.

Ghana's record football win, 13-2 in 1965, came against which country?

Kenya: their coach, Peter Oronge, went missing just before the match, and an emergency stand-in had to take charge.

In 1962 Ghana hosted and drew 3-3 with which European club, then champions of Spain?

Real Madrid, European champions five times by then, drew 3-3 with Ghana in the capital in August 1962, a result celebrated as a landmark for Ghanaian football.

Ghana's 1967 'new' currency unit was pegged at introduction to what?

Half a pound sterling: yet within months the military government devalued it by 30% against the US dollar.

Which Ghanaian-British architect led the design of Washington's National Museum of African American History and Culture?

David Adjaye topped the museum with a three-tiered corona modelled on a crown from Yoruba sculpture.

The Ewe people of Ghana's Volta Region trace their migration to the Ketu area of which modern country?

Benin: Ewe tradition traces the people from Ketu, a Yoruba town in present-day Benin, westward to the walled city of Notsie in Togo, from which they dispersed into the Volta Region in the 17th century.

Ghana attended the 1961 Belgrade conference that founded which international grouping?

Non-Aligned Movement: its host, Yugoslavia, was a communist state that had broken with Stalin's Soviet Union in 1948.

As of the mid-2020s, which West African country is the only one producing more cocoa than Ghana?

Ivory Coast: yet cacao is not native to Africa at all; the tree comes from the Amazon rainforest.