Historic James Town

You are standing at the base of the James Town Lighthouse, a squat white tower built in nineteen thirty-one, and from up here -- or from the street below looking up at it -- you can understand in a single glance why this strip of Atlantic coastline mattered so much to so many competing powers over so many centuries. The sea stretches south and west without interruption all the way to the Americas. The air smells of salt and fish and woodsmoke. Somewhere below you, wooden canoes in vivid yellows and blues are already moving through the surf, their crews reading the ocean in ways that the colonial administrators who built this lighthouse never could.

James Town is the oldest continuously inhabited neighbourhood in Accra, and it is the place where the city began. Long before Accra was a capital, before it was even called Accra with any consistency, the Ga people were living on this low ridge above the Atlantic, fishing the rich coastal waters, trading along the beach, and building the compact, dense community that you are about to walk through. The Ga are one of the indigenous peoples of southern Ghana, a group with their own language -- also called Ga -- their own religious traditions, their own system of governance through chiefs and stool houses, and a deep, rooted identity tied to this specific stretch of coastline. When you ask a Ga elder where their people come from, they will gesture toward the sea and toward the land in the same motion.

James Fort sits at the eastern edge of the James Town waterfront, its low white walls facing the sea with a blunt, functional authority that has not softened over three hundred and fifty years. The British built this fort in sixteen seventy-three -- one of a string of trading posts and fortified warehouses that European powers constructed along the Gold Coast beginning in the fifteenth century to secure their access to the gold, ivory, and, increasingly, enslaved people that moved through this coast. The fort's full name was Fort James, named after the Duke of York, who later became King James the Second of England. It changed hands more than once -- the Dutch held it for a period, the Brandenburgers from Prussia had a presence along this coast, and the Danes established their own fortifications nearby -- but the British ultimately held James Fort and made it a cornerstone of their Gold Coast operations.

The fort's history is not comfortable. It served as a holding point in the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved people -- many of them Akan and Ga individuals taken from the interior or captured in the complex wars and raids that the slave trade itself helped generate -- were held in the dungeons of this fort before being loaded onto ships bound for the Americas and the Caribbean. Standing in front of these walls, it is worth pausing to hold that history fully in your attention. The stones are not abstract. The dungeons were used. Ships departed from this beach. The people who passed through here did not choose to go.

A few hundred metres east of James Fort, Ussher Fort completes the colonial bracketing of the James Town waterfront -- two forts, two periods, one coast, one brutal commercial system. Ussher Fort was originally built by the Dutch in sixteen forty-nine and was known as Crevecoeur, meaning broken heart, which is either a poetic coincidence or a name that captures something about what this place witnessed. The British acquired it from the Dutch in eighteen sixty-eight as part of a territorial exchange along the Gold Coast, renamed it Ussher Fort after Herbert Taylor Ussher, a colonial administrator who served as Administrator of the Gold Coast in the eighteen seventies, and incorporated it into their expanding system of coastal control.

The fort operated as a prison during the colonial period and continued in that function after Ghanaian independence in nineteen fifty-seven. It is still used as a prison today, which means that the interior is not accessible to visitors, but the exterior walls and the seaward bastions are visible and they speak clearly enough. The cannon ports that face the sea were defensive installations against rival European powers -- the Gold Coast was a genuinely contested space, with English, Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Brandenburger trading posts and forts sometimes within sight of each other along the same stretch of coast, their relationships shifting between competition, diplomacy, and armed conflict depending on the European political weather of the moment.

Come down to the beach. This is the living heart of James Town -- not the colonial forts, not the lighthouse, but this stretch of sand and surf where the Ga fishing community has been working the Atlantic since before any European ship appeared on this horizon. The canoes pulled up on the beach are painted in bold primary colours, their names lettered in careful hand-painted script along the hull: religious phrases, proverbs, the names of family members, declarations of faith and luck. Every canoe carries a name because every canoe carries the hopes of the people who work it.

The Ga have been sea fishers on this coast for centuries. The traditional fishing canoe -- a long, narrow dugout carved from the trunk of the wawa tree, a lightweight softwood that grows in the Ghanaian forest zones inland -- is still the primary fishing vessel for James Town's community. The canoes are paddled out through the surf by crews of between five and fifteen men, depending on the size of the catch being attempted, using broad-bladed paddles in a coordinated rhythm that lifts the bow over the breaking waves and drives the hull into the calmer water beyond. The technique requires years of practice and a precise reading of the surf conditions. On heavy days, when the Atlantic swell is running high, canoe launches are violent, spray-drenched affairs that demand every ounce of the crew's collective strength and timing.

Tucked into the lanes at the western edge of James Town, a few minutes' walk from the fishing beach, you will find one of the most original artistic communities in West Africa. This is the home territory of Attukwei Clottey -- known as GoLokal -- a Ghanaian artist whose large-scale sculptures and processional performances using recycled plastic jerrycans have made him internationally famous and whose work begins here, in the neighbourhood where his family has lived for generations. The art community that has grown around his practice involves local young people, recycled materials sourced from the neighbourhood, and a philosophy that connects contemporary global concerns about plastic waste to the specific experience of communities in the Global South where that waste ends up.

The jerrycan is a loaded object in this part of Accra. The yellow plastic containers -- usually twenty-litre containers originally designed for water storage -- are ubiquitous throughout Ghana and across West Africa, used to carry water in communities that lack reliable piped supply, to transport fuel, to store palm oil and cooking ingredients. In James Town, where water infrastructure has historically been inadequate for the population, jerrycans have been everyday objects of survival for decades. Attukwei takes these containers -- used, discarded, marked by their previous lives -- and weaves them together into large sculptural panels and installation pieces that are simultaneously beautiful and deeply political.

James Town has produced more Ghanaian boxing champions than any other neighbourhood in Africa's most decorated boxing nation, and the gym is where that tradition is kept alive. Ghana's relationship with boxing is deep, old, and nationally significant. The first Ghanaian to win a world boxing championship was David Kotei -- known as D.K. Poison -- who won the WBC featherweight title in nineteen seventy-five, defeating Ruben Olivares in Los Angeles in front of a watching nation. He was followed by Azumah Nelson, who grew up in Accra and became the greatest African boxer of his generation -- a three-division world champion who defended his titles with a ferocity and technical precision that earned him comparisons to the greats of world boxing history. Nelson is from James Town. His neighbourhood produced him.

The boxing gyms of James Town -- there are several, in various states of formal organisation, from fully equipped training facilities to open-air spaces with a hanging bag and a few lengths of rope strung between poles -- draw young men from across Accra who see boxing not just as a sport but as a route out of poverty and into recognition. The training regimen is serious. Fighters are on the road before dawn, running the streets of James Town and along the beach while the fishing canoes are launching. The gym sessions in the morning and evening are disciplined and demanding. The coaches -- many of them former fighters themselves -- operate within an oral tradition of boxing knowledge that runs from the current generation back through Nelson and Kotei and the coaches who trained them.

Bukom Square is the social and commercial centre of James Town -- the open space where the neighbourhood gathers, where the market spills across the pavement, where children play and traders call and the general noise and energy of one of Accra's oldest urban communities concentrates itself. The market here is not the organised formal market of a purpose-built facility but the organic street market of a neighbourhood that has been trading in this spot for generations: cloth sellers and food vendors and phone-charging stations and the women who fry kelewele -- spiced, deep-fried plantain -- in large iron pans over open fires, the smell of which will reach you before you see the stalls.

The food of the James Town market reflects the Ga culinary tradition, which is closely tied to the fishing economy. Kenkey -- fermented corn dough wrapped and steamed in corn husks, with a slightly sour flavour and a dense, filling texture -- is the staple starch of the Ga people and is sold here in large quantities, usually accompanied by a sauce of fried fish, pepper, and tomato. Banku, a similar fermented corn-and-cassava dough, is also widely available. The women who cook and sell these foods are often the same women connected to the fishing beach, processing the catch that their husbands and sons bring in and converting it into the cooked meals that feed the neighbourhood.

You are walking east now, out of James Town and into Osu, and the character of the city shifts around you. The dense, low-rise residential fabric of James Town gives way to wider streets, larger buildings, the commercial and diplomatic activity of a neighbourhood that has been adjacent to power for more than three hundred and fifty years. Christiansborg Castle -- the great white fortress that sits on a low promontory jutting into the Atlantic at the eastern end of Osu -- appears at the end of the street ahead of you, its whitewashed walls almost luminous in the West African light.

The castle was built by the Danes in sixteen sixty-one -- or begun then, with the earliest structures dating to that period and substantial additions made through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Danes called it Christiansborg, meaning Christian's Castle, after the Danish king. It served as the headquarters of the Danish Gold Coast operations, which were primarily focused on the slave trade: the castle has dungeons in which enslaved people were held before being loaded onto Danish ships bound for the Danish colonies in the Caribbean, particularly the Danish Virgin Islands. The Danes sold the castle to the British in eighteen fifty, and the British made it the seat of their Gold Coast colonial government -- the residence of the Governor and the administrative nerve centre of the colony. When Ghana became independent in nineteen fifty-seven, Christiansborg Castle became the official seat of the Ghanaian government and the residence of the head of state.

Independence Square is one of the great ceremonial spaces of postcolonial Africa -- a vast open esplanade between the city and the sea, anchored at its northern end by the Black Star Gate, the triumphal arch that has become the most recognisable symbol of Ghanaian independence and the image most closely associated with Kwame Nkrumah and the moment of March the sixth, nineteen fifty-seven.

Nkrumah was one of the most significant political figures of the twentieth century. Born in nineteen o nine in Nkroful in what was then the Gold Coast, educated in the United States and Britain, he returned to the Gold Coast in nineteen forty-seven and organised the Convention People's Party, which campaigned for immediate self-government through mass civil disobedience, strikes, and boycotts. The British imprisoned him in nineteen fifty. He won a general election from prison. They released him. He became prime minister of the Gold Coast in nineteen fifty-two and then, on March the sixth, nineteen fifty-seven, stood in this square and declared the independence of Ghana -- the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonial rule in the postwar period. His declaration that evening -- 'Ghana, your beloved country, is free forever' -- was heard across Africa and reverberated through every independence movement on the continent. Nkrumah understood that Ghana's freedom was meant to be a signal and a model.

Your walk ends here, at the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre in Cantonments, a short distance inland from the ceremonial sweep of Independence Square, in a quiet compound shaded by frangipani trees. This is the house where William Edward Burghardt Du Bois -- the American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and Pan-Africanist philosopher who is one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century -- lived for the last two years of his life, and where he died on August the twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-three, the day before Martin Luther King delivered the 'I Have a Dream' speech at the March on Washington. Du Bois was ninety-five years old. He had come to Ghana at the personal invitation of Kwame Nkrumah.

Du Bois had spent his entire adult life -- from the eighteen nineties onward -- arguing that the liberation of Black people everywhere was inseparable from the liberation of Africa, and that African independence was inseparable from the liberation of the Black diaspora. He had organised Pan-African Congresses, written 'The Souls of Black Folk,' fought against racial segregation in the United States, and lived long enough to see the country he had spent decades dreaming of -- an independent, self-governing Ghana -- become real. When Nkrumah invited him to come to Accra and lead a major encyclopaedia project documenting African history and culture, Du Bois accepted. He renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana. He died here, in this house, still working.